
Qass_ 2SJLS 

Book 



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A Short History 

of 

American Presbyterianism 



7i 



From Its Foundations to 
the Reunion of 1869 



PHILADELPHIA 
Presbyterian Board of Publication and Sabbath- 
School Work 
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Contents 



1 The Period from the Founding of the Presby- 
terian Church in the United States of America to 
the Commencement of the War of the Revolution, 
by the Rev. Alexander T. McGill, D. D., LL. D., 
Professor of Ecclesiastical, Homiletic and Pastoral 
Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary. 

Early Adversities. — Discouragements. — Disaster. — Divine Pur- 
pose. — Spontaneous Creed.- — Obscurity of Origin. — Francis 
Makemie. — First Presbytery. — Identity of Presbyterianism. 
— Character of the Founder. — Makemie at New York.— 
Schemes for Establishing Prelacy. — Makemie and Corn- 
bury. — Makemie Preaches in New York. — Arrested and 
Imprisoned. — Trial. — Disgrace of Cornbury. — Vesey and 
Trinity Church. — First Presbyterian Church, New York. — 
Damage from Trinity Church. — Extent of Intolerance. — 
Refuge in the Border Valley. — Character of its Inhabitants. 
— Presbyterian Power of Organization. — More Perfect as it 
Increases. — Underlying Principles. — Primary Court. — Suf- 
frage and the Commission. — Mutual Concession. — History of 
Courts in Gradation. — Two Republican Structures. — Church 
and State Contrasted. — Two Currents meet at Philadelphia. 
— Presbyterianism Prevails. — Men of New England Content. 
— Soon in the Lead. — Trial in " The Great Awakening." — 
Excesses of Revivalists. — New Brunswick Insubordination. 
— Family of the Tennents. — John and William Tennent at 
Freehold. — Whitefield with the Tennents. — Protest of Robert 
Cross. — The Schism begins in Tumult. — Overture of Jonathan 
3 



4 CONTEXTS 

Dickinson. — It Fails. — The Synod of New York. — The Pro- 
test not her Act as a Synod. — Inconsistency of Gilbert Ten- 
nent. — The Confessions and the College. — Main Cause of 
Reunion the Standards. — The Reunion Accomplished. — The 
Leading Survivors. — Excellence of the Plan. — Fitness for 
another Stage of Militancy. — Probity with the Indians. — 
Conspicuously Presbyterian Policy. — Corporation of the 
Widows' Fund. — Beatty and Duffield. — Benevolence and 
Missions. — Patriotism in the Pleld. — Its early Demonstra- 
tions. — Its Enthusiasm at the Frontier 7 

II. The Period from the War of the Revolution to 
the Adoption of the " Presbyterian Form of Gov- 
ernment" (1786), by the Rev. Samuel M. Hop- 
kins, D. D., Hyde Professor of Ecclesiastical 
History and Church Polity, Auburn Theological 
Seminary. 

I. Religious Condition of the Colonies in 1775. — The Various 
Denominations Existing. — Baptists and Methodists, Roman 
Catholics and Quakers. — Episcopacy as Established in the 
Colonies. — Character of the Missionaries from England. — 
Persecution of the Presbyterians in Virginia. — Fidelity of the 
Colonial Episcopal Clergy to the British Government. — Dis- 
appearance of Episcopacy after the Declaration of Independ- 
ence. — Episcopacy and Monarchy. — Case of the Rev. Jacob 
Duche. — First Prayer in Congress after the Declaration. — 
Relapse of Mr. Duche 65 

II. Growth of Presbyterianism in America in the Eighteenth 
Century. — Universal Patriotism of the Presbyterian Clergy. — 
Presbyterianism and Civil Liberty. — Loyalty of the Colonial 
Presbyterians to the British Throne. — Pastoral Letter of May, 
1775. — The Rev. Samuel Davies on the Death of George II. — 
Distinction between the Claims of the King and the Parlia- 
ment. — The Presbyterian Clergy continue to Pray for the 
King. — The Georgium Sidus. — Dr. John Rodgers and the 
Patriot Prayer Meeting. — Presbyterian Clergy in the Field. — 
Dr. John Witherspoon. — The Ecclesiastical Characteristics 



CONTENTS 5 

and other Writings.^-Becomes President of Princeton College 
and Member of Congress. — His Zeal for Liberty. — The War 
a " Presbyterian Rebellion." — Not a Religious War. — The 
Hessians. — Synodical Action on the War 83 

III. Condition of the Presbyterian Church at the Close of the 
War. — Increase of her Ministry and Zeal for a High Educa- 
tion. — Her Superiority to any other Church at that Period. — 
The Synod's Declaration in Favor of Religious Equality. — 
Struggle in Virginia for Exclusive Privileges. — Patrick 
Henry's Bill for a General Tax. — Origin of the Hanover 
Presbytery. — Samuel Morris. — Morris* Reading-house. — 
" Lutherans." — Act of Uniformity and Toleration Act in 
America. — The Rev. Mr. Robinson in Hanover. — The Rev. 
Samuel Davies. — Resistance of the Presbytery of Hanover to 
Mr. Henry's Bill. — Concluding Struggle and Triumph of Re- 
ligious Liberty. — Sale of the Virginia Glebe Lands .... 109 

IV. Meeting of the First Synod after the Close of the War. — 
Pastoral Letter of Congratulation. — Dearth of the Scriptures. 
— First English Edition Published in America. — Plan of Dr. 
John Rodgers for Supplying the Discharged Soldiers. — Letter 
of General Washington to him on the Subject. — Miscellaneous 
Action of the Synod. — Initial Steps toward the New Consti- 
tution. — Conclusion •••....131 

III. The Period from the Adoption of the Presbyte- 
rian Form of Government to the Reunion of 1869, 
by the Rev. Samuel J. Wilson, D. D., LL. D., 
Professor of Biblical and Ecclesiastical History, 
Western Theological Seminary. 

Independence Achieved. — Presbyterian Patriots. — Suffered in 
the War. — The First General Assembly. — Its Men. — A 
Common Bond of the Church. — Its Action. — Shock of the 
French Revolution. — Impiety Abounding. — The Clouds 
Scattered by Revivals. — 1781 to 1787. — Prayer Meeting in 
Hampden-Sidney College. — Spread of the Work. — Kentucky. 



CONTENTS 

— The Year 1800. — Froth. — Schism Leading to Formation 
of Cumberland Presbyterian Church. — North Carolina. — 
Virginia. — Western Pennsylvania. — New Jersey. — Cheering 
Reports of 1 803-18 12. — Extension of the Work Northward 
and Eastward. — From the First a Missionary Church. — Ag- 
gressive Agencies. — The Indians. — Presbyterianism a Pro- 
moter of Learning. — Vital Forces. — The Plan of Union. — 
Antagonisms. — Division of 1838. — The Two Bodies. — Civil 
War. — Drawing Together. — The Issues Settled. — Reunion. 141 



American Presbyterianism 



From the Founding of the Presbyterian 
Church to the War of the Revolution 



Presbyterians, unlike others of all the chief de- 
nominations in our favored nation, came to the her- 
itage which they have by this time, with little or no 
incorporation at the first. Episcopalians, Congre- 
gationalists, Reformed Dutch, Swedes, Baptists, 
Methodists, Lutheran and Reformed Germans, — all 
came at the beginning in bands of some previous 
organization or compact in the Old World for the 
purpose of settlement here in the way of coloniza- 
tion or mission at least, in order to prepare the way 
for transplanting the old or new sodalities of other 
lands. 1 The most remarkable fact which distin- 

1 History of the Presbyterian Churchy by Dr. Charles Hodge, 
Part I, p. 21. 

7 



8 EARLY ADVERTISERS 

guishes our beginning is that every attempt of this 
kind was foiled by some baleful disaster. The 
earliest failure on record, probably, was that of the 
Eagle's Wing, a ship freighted for America in 1637 
with ministers and people from Scotland and Ire- 
land, to follow the example of the Puritans who 
had so recently embarked from England and suc- 
cessfully reached these shores. Everything seemed 
to be well appointed for conveying to a friendly 
haven here a compacted Presbyterian body, in full 
shape, as a model of elderships already made, and 
sure to begin a commonwealth of session, presby- 
tery and synod. But the sea wrought and was 
tempestuous, and storms of heaven compelled them 
to return. 1 John Bramhall, archbishop of Armagh, 
who represented prelacy in Ireland, lashed the dis- 
appointed voyagers with ridicule in Latin verse. 
But Samuel Rutherford, of Scotland, with prophetic 
sympathy, saw deeper into the mystery of that 
result, and wrote, in one of those letters which have 
a saintly fragrance for all generations, " I would not 
have you think it strange that your journey to New 
England has got such a dash. It hath, indeed, made 
my heart heavy, but I know that it is no dumb 
Providence, but a speaking one. whereby the Lord 
speaks his mind to you, though for the present ye 
do not well understand what he saith." 

1 Reed's History of the Presbyterian Churchy Ireland. 



DISCOURAGEMENTS 9 

The God of our fathers continued, however, to 
speak in this way. A plan for colonizing America 
with their own disciples was approved by some 
seventy members of the Westminster Assembly be- 
fore their session ended, but the civil war hindered 
its execution. 1 Immediately after the battle of Dun- 
bar, Oliver Cromwell sent shiploads of Scotchmen 
to be sold in these plantations for the expenses of 
their passage. And after the Restoration, Charles 
II sent his prisoners from the risings of Pentland 
and Bothwell to be sold in like manner from Bos- 
ton to Charleston, at any price that might pay for 
transporting them to exile. But all this, of course, 
was cruel dispersion, and not the pilgrimage of 
churches. Schemes in Scotland to fill emigrant 
ships with Covenanters taken from the mountain 
gorges and the filthy prisons, where only they 
could escape the dragoons of Claverhouse, though 
favored by wealthy patrons and prompted by the 
persecuting government itself, were always dashed 
by some adversity — perhaps a spiteful arrest of the 
embarkation at the very point of departure, crazy 
ships which could not make the passage, desolating 
fevers on shipboard, or a pestilential home awaiting 
them at the place of their destination, as it was at 
Port Royal in South Carolina. Something always 
turned up to baffle and disperse a transported Pres- 

1 Webster's History of the Presbyterian Church in America. 



10 DISCOURAGEMENTS 

byterianism. The last enterprise of this kind was 
the saddest of all. A noble confessor, of whom the 
world v/as not worthy, son of a wealthy patriot 
who had done much service to the State— George 
Scot of Pitlochie — for the crime of harboring John 
Welsh in his house and following him in "the 
preaching of the fields/' had been ruined in his pat- 
rimony by insatiate fines and broken in health by 
cruel imprisonment, and at length permitted to 
leave his country with his life, provided he would 
take with him, at his own expense, a cargo of sim- 
ilar offenders to a settlement somewhere in East 
Jersey. With wise and persevering aim he deter- 
mined to gather a Presbyterian church for his com- 
pany — Archibald Riddel for the minister, John 
Fraser, a candidate for the ministry, elders and dea- 
cons and people of the best condition, Bibles and 
psalm books and Confessions of Faith. More than 
double the number of pilgrims that had filled the 
Mayflower at Plymouth, as near the beginning of 
the century as this was the end, crowded the ship 
of Pitlochie, and superior, perhaps, to any shipload 
of men and women that ever weighed anchor in 
passing over to America, estimating their social po- 
sition at home along with their intelligence and 
piety and devotion to the liberty of Christ. But the 
depth of ocean claimed that sainted colony for its 
own. The master of the ship was brutally inhuman. 



DIVINE PURPOSE 11 

Their provisions were spoiled, a deadly fever seized 
the passengers and dropped them in the sea, the great 
majority, including that heroic George himself and 
his wife, and all of his except one married daughter. 1 
These memorials of peculiar adversity are now, 
indeed, as Rutherford would say, "a speaking- 
Providence " to us, and we may understand the 
meaning. It was that Presbyterianism, " whose 
seed is in itself after his kind," should be indigen- 
ous upon American soil, and show here as nowhere 
else its innate and incomparable force of organiza- 
tion; that no ready-made consolidation should be 
imported here, with transplanted shape or exotic 
tradition, to find its genesis in accidents of European 
history for all coming time. The seeds of West- 
minster, wafted hither, as their field is the world, 
must come like the thistledown, detached from one 
another and floating individually, as if borne to be 
dispersed, and growing ripe only to be scattered 
abroad by every wind that blows. Like Abraham, 
the man of this faith must receive in solitary exile 
the promise that a nation shall be born of him and 
all this wilderness shall be the possession of his 
principles. It was appointed of God that the polity 
of Presbyterians, like each man's own pocket Bible, 
should be an individual conviction before it became 
a conventional arrangement, gathered with private 

1 Wodrow and Webster. 



12 SPONTANEOUS CREED 

judgment from inspired pages, and written on the 
table of the heart before it had occasion to bind 
itself about the neck and adorn the hands of a great 
denomination. 

So it had sprung forth at the first Reformation, 
when Protestantism, to the four-fifths of its whole 
extension, emerged, a Presbyterian organism in all 
the leading features of its visibility. So it had 
sprung forth at the second Reformation, in Puritan 
mightiness, with the overthrow of Tudor and Stuart 
prelacy in England, when the fallow grounds of 
civil and religious liberty were plowed so deeply 
at the springtide of the English commonwealth. 
Never before did truth so spring out of the earth 
and righteousness look down from heaven at the 
work of symbolism, without apology to be made 
any more, in a creed, and without a bias in the 
body, religious or political, as when the hundred 
and twenty-one divines, along with thirty statesmen 
illustrious for ability and learning, were summoned 
to construct our standards in the chapel of Henry 
the Seventh. And now the virgin soil of a new 
world was to have a like spontaneous growth of 
the same model, and that beyond the reach of any 
of that reactionary influence which has always been 
lurking in the dormitories of spiritual despotism, 
through the Old World. 

Hence that obscurity which hides from us the 



OBSCURITY OF ORIGIN 13 

precise date and particular place at which the first 
Presbyterian organization was made in our country. 
It is always hard to tell the first blade of corn that 
appears in a field over which the seed has been scat- 
tered in season or out of season. Long Island has 
claimed it for Jamaica. But more than twenty 
years before, McNish, the first Presbyterian minis- 
ter there, moved for an eldership and a presbytery. 
Riddel, the minister whom Pitlochie selected, was 
laboring in 1685 at Woodbridge. New Jersey has 
therefore claimed it; but the ministry of Riddel was 
transient as a missionary tour; he returned in a little 
time to Scotland. So Maryland has claimed it, and 
historians generally concede this claim; because, in 
answer to an application from Colonel Stevens in 
1680 to the Presbytery of Laggan, Ireland, Francis 
Makemie came to Maryland in the year 1682 and be- 
gan to organize churches at once. And yet in 1684 
he wrote to Increase Mather from Elizabeth River, in 
Virginia, that his lot had been providentially cast 
among "a poor and desolate people" there, who 
had lost their "dissenting minister" by death in 
August of 1683. It is evident, therefore, that soon 
after he came to this country he was laboring on the 
east branch of Elizabeth River, Norfolk County, 
Va., as the successor of a dissenting, and probably 
Presbyterian, minister, whose settlement there had 
been indefinitely earlier. 



14 FRANCIS MAKEMIE 

But beyond all question, Francis Makemie, the 
Irishman, born in Donegal and educated among the 
Scottish universities, began the organizing of our 
Church throughout this land, with abounding mis- 
sionary toil to gather it and amazing skill of admin- 
istration to settle it. Of course he brought his 
convictions of truth and order with him to work 
with and not to speculate about as an alterable 
Presbyterianism, which might be made something 
other than it had been in order to suit American 
people. His errand was to plant what he already 
knew and believed in. And whilst he wrote for 
help in all directions, to Boston and to London, 
where Congregational and Presbyterian unions ex- 
isted, it was to Ireland he would go back, through 
all perils of the sea, to bring over men like himself 
in culture and conviction, to carry on his work and 
extend it, as he did in 1705, when he brought with 
him John Hampton and George McNish. 

The first presbytery met in 1706 at Freehold, 
N. J., soon after his return with such recruits, and 
he was the moderator. It consisted of eight min- 
isters, including the one ordained at that meeting, 
with as many ruling elders as might be present, and 
who were present on the rolls of that initial period 
(which are extant) in as large proportion as they 
have ever attended since. The members were all 
Scotch-Irish, excepting one, the pastor of Philadel- 



FIRST PRESBYTERY 15 

phia, Jedediah Andrews, who was from Massa- 
chusetts; Francis Makemie, John Hampton, George 
McNish, Samuel Davis, John Wilson, Nathaniel 
Taylor and John Boyd were the other ministers; 
and the record shows that everything proceeded 
with the same order and the same transaction and 
the same parlance of the minute as if the Presbytery 
of Laggan itself had been transported bodily to 
Freehold, as they had resolved that it should be if 
Usher had not mitigated at that very time the yoke 
of prelacy under which they were groaning in Ire- 
land. 1 To say, therefore, that American Presby- 
terianism is "its own type," different from the 
system everywhere else, must be either untrue in 
the light of our authentic annals or a mere truism in 
historical averment, as much as to say that French 
and Genevan and Holland and English and Scotch 
and Irish Presbyterianism is each its own type. 
There is but one type of what is divinely true, since 
the Archetype ascended to "give" a pattern from 
"the mount." And if there be anything peculiar 
in calling this American, it must be the perfect free- 
dom with which it works off here everything that 
shaped or constrained it elsewhere by "the com- 
mandments of men." 
Francis Makemie himself was a type of the 

1 See Records, edited by Dr. Wm. M. Engles, Board of Publica- 
tion. 



16 CHARACTER OF MAKEMIE 

American minister, more complete, probably, than 
any other man ever born and educated on our own 
soil through all our generations. Intensely individ- 
ual and yet many-sided, firm yet versatile, thought- 
ful and practical, devoted to one thing and occupied 
with many things, he was indeed the father of that 
'"peculiar" body, the presbyterate of this denomi- 
nation, and the only " priesthood " we have except 
our people. Beginning with a good education, 
soundness in the faith and soberness of mind, to 
try the religion of his fathers in the experiment of 
life, making all circumstances yield to its impor- 
tance, taming the wilderness with its culture, and 
founding customs, laws and constitutions of social 
and civil advancement according to its paramount 
and original norm, he came as a missionajy and 
lived like an apostle; aggressive, obeying God 
rather than man; loyal to Caesar, but never abashed 
before his tribunals; working with his own hands, 
though at the business of a merchant, and giving to 
the Church of his own substance more than he re- 
ceived from her all the days of his life. 

Having preached some time at Barbadoes on 
his way to this country, it was at "the Barbadoes 
store" in this city that he preached the first Presby- 
terian sermon at Philadelphia in the year 1692, some 
six years before the settlement of the first pastor, 
Mr. Andrews. 



CHARACTER OF MAKEMIE 17 

The care of all the churches was upon him; and 
no itinerant ever journeyed so much on the coast of 
our country in seeking "a certain people scattered 
abroad and dispersed among the people," and yet 
no man was ever so much intent on establishing 
permanent and pastoral relations and precise pres- 
byterial connections. He wrote well, with a vigor- 
ous pen, and began well in using the press for in- 
struction to the young and the ignorant. His first 
production was a catechism, and his second a de- 
fense of that catechism against George Keith, a man 
of vast notoriety as an apostate Quaker and rene- 
gade Episcopalian. This made Makemie famous at 
Boston as an author, and won for him the admi- 
ration of Increase and Cotton Mather. He was a 
Christian gentleman, withal, of the most cultivated 
manners, and an orator of graceful power and fasci- 
nating address. He always captivated the rulers of 
Maryland and Virginia in his applications to them 
for the liberty of preaching, and he never failed to 
win his way with these accomplishments until he 
came to New York and dined with Edward Hyde, 
the Viscount Cornbury, a full cousin of Queen Anne, 
and grandson of Clarendon, the historian of calumny. 

Cornbury had come as governor of the colony in 
1702. Nine years before this unfortunate event a 
statute had passed through the assembly and coun- 
cil by "an artifice." according to the boast of its 



18 LORD CORN BURY 

author subsequently made, the whole assembly be- 
ing dissenters except the speaker himself. By this 
act the territory was to be divided into parishes for 
"one good and sufficient minister" in each, to be 
supported by taxes levied on all the people. Most 
of the people being Dutch, and honestly believing 
that one "good and sufficient minister" might be 
Reformed or independent just as well as Episcopa- 
lian, and the people in every parish being authorized 
to assess their own taxes and choose their own 
pastors, no ruler, governor or judge dared to unveil 
the trick, and it remained a dead letter until Corn- 
bury came with "instructions," as he alleged, from 
the court or council of the queen. These instruc- 
tions were, in substance, that the "Act of Tolera- 
tion," William and Mary, 1689, should not be ex- 
tended to the province of New York without the 
express permission of the governor. High-church 
partisans, we know, carried everything in the court 
of Queen Anne. "The Venerable Society for the 
Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts " was 
instituted in 1701 under such auspices, with ample 
funds and powerful patrons, political as well as 
religious. George Keith, Colonel Morris and Lord 
Cornbury were now factors on this side of the 
Atlantic to nullify the Act of Toleration, establish the 
hierarchy of England in America, and restore the 
intolerance which had been overthrown by the 



SCHE3IES FOE ESTABLISHISG PRELACY 19 

revolution at home. Simultaneous with Cornbury's 
arrival was the effort of Morris to persuade the 
colonial assembly of New Jersey to give up their 
government to the Crown and enact the same 
" artifice" for the Church as in New York — a meas- 
ure defeated by only two votes, one of a Quaker 
and the other of a Baptist, and yet virtually accom- 
plished for thirty-six years by the proprietaries 
themselves when they surrendered to the Crown 
their possessions in New Jersey as a burden more 
than a profit. Even William Penn was startled at 
this turn of spiritual despotism when he found Lord 
Cornbury looking after Philadelphia, and the vestry- 
men of the city actually intriguing for an extension 
of the viscount's authority over them. A storm 
from the pen of that mild philanthropist effectually 
stopped the business in Pennsylvania, when he 
wrote to the lords of trade and plantations demand- 
ing that they should either buy him out or let him 
buy out "the hot Church party/' as he called it. 

At this time it was that Makemie and Hampton 
came along on their way to Boston in quest of 
more ministers. Their fame had preceded them at 
New York. The governor himself sought their 
acquaintance. But with all his politeness and pre- 
tension, they would not ask him for leave to 
preach, and he was enraged. The Dutch and 
French churches both refused the pulpit to Ma- 



20 MAKEMIE PREACHES IN NEW YORK 

kemie through fear of the tyrant, who had openly 
declared that the "one good and sufficient min- 
ister/' in the act of 1693, must be construed as one 
episcopally ordained according to the Church of 
England, so that no other English preaching at least 
should be had in New York without his consent; 
and even Dutch and French preaching was made to 
feel that it was free by sufferance and shielded by 
its foreign tongues, rather than by prescription or 
treaty or law. But still the Scotch-Irish Presbyte- 
rian would preach in New York, and that without 
the governor's leave; and accordingly, in a private 
house on Pearl Street, that of William Jackson, a 
shoemaker, the first Presbyterian sermon was 
preached to as many as would hear him, with doors 
and windows open, on the text Psalm 50: 23: "To 
him that ordereth his conversation aright will I 
show the salvation of God." An infant child also 
was baptized in that service. The same day Hamp- 
ton preached at Newtown, Long Island. 

Early in the week they were both arrested and 
brought before the angry and bigoted official. 
With the utmost dignity and manliness Makemie 
demanded to know by what law the arrest was 
made. Cornbury said his " instructions " were the 
law, and they would not suffer him to allow 
"strolling preachers to spread their pernicious doc- 
trines." Makemie replied that his Confession of 



ARRESTED AND IMPRISONED 21 

Faith was known to the world, that his doctrines 
were sound, the same as the articles of the Church 
that denied him the right to preach them, and chal- 
lenged examination, saying that they had been 
already approved by the authorities of Virginia and 
Maryland, and at Barbadoes also, where he had 
been qualified according to the act of toleration. 
At this the persecutor exclaimed that no law of the 
kind belonged to the colonies, and no permission, 
at any rate from another province, would avail 
under his government, and he would know nothing 
but his own instructions from Her Majesty's coun- 
cil. Makemie denied that his instructions were 
law, and again demanded a sight of the statute 
under which he was arrested. "You, sir, know 
law!" said Cornbury, with a sneer, and ordered 
him to prison. 

Everything technical in the form of commitment 
was violated. Repeated experiments to correct the 
blundering were made, and each blunder of the 
writ had to be paid for by the prisoners, whilst 
they were kept all the while in jail. It seemed im- 
possible to obtain either liberty or trial. After two 
months' imprisonment he was released on bail, and 
immediately went back to attend a meeting of pres- 
bytery in Philadelphia, thence resuming his mis- 
sionary work, without forgetting his recognizance 
at New York. 



22 TRIAL— DISGRACE OF CORNBURY 

At length a true bill was found against Makemie, 
Hampton being released. When the trial came on, 
the accused was defended by counsel and by him- 
self. Tradition lauds the eloquence and power of 
his argument. The prosecution was overwhelmed 
with defeat and shame before judge and jury, and 
he was unanimously acquitted. Yet the cost to 
him of that persecuting false imprisonment and the 
trial was enormous, designed to make him still a 
prisoner for the debt. And he narrowly escaped a 
second arrest and the jail because he refused to 
promise that he would not preach again in New 
York, and actually did preach in the French church. 

Within a year after this outrage on the Presbyte- 
rians, Lord Cornbury was superseded in office — not 
for his bigoted intolerance, however, but for his 
profligacy and corruption, a dishonored bankrupt 
and a disgrace alike to Church and State. Yet even 
in his downfall he raved against Makemie, and at- 
tempted to justify the atrocious wrong of that per- 
secution before the lords of trade and plantations 
with the following description of our venerated 
founder, which, in softer phrase, might be consid- 
ered apostolic fitness for his work in America: 
" He is jack-of-all-trades: he is a preacher, a doctor 
of physic, a merchant, an attorney, a counselor-at- 
law, and, which is worst of all, a disturber of gov- 
ernments/' The same year, 1708, Makemie died. 



VESEY AND TRINITY CHURCH 23 

The agitation of this affair and other iniquitous 
proceedings, like the wrong done to Jamaica in rob- 
bing her by fraud and violence of both church and 
glebe — the most valuable church property on Long 
Island— and compelling her people to wait through 
almost thirty years of expensive litigation to recover 
it from the Episcopalians, at length disgusted gov- 
ernors and judges even belonging to that sect. 1 A 
feud also had been occasioned between clergy and 
laity by the greed and ambition of Vesey, the first 
rector of Trinity Church. He had been born and 
bred a Puritan, and had been sent by Increase 
Mather to look after the Congregationalists about 
New York. But Governor Fletcher, another of the 
most corrupt men of his age, offered him the rec- 
torship and sent him to England for " orders," al- 
though he was ultimately installed by two ministers 
of the Reformed Dutch Church. He was entirely 
bought over, and at once became even more than 
"conformed." His eye was taken with a small 
farm called the "King's Bowerie," and he deter- 
mined to grasp the fee simple for Trinity. The 
Episcopalian people desired only a lease, being op- 
posed to mortmain not only, but to the schemes of 
Vesey in general, having little confidence in his in- 
tegrity or sanctity. But he triumphed over the best 
and ablest laymen of his church, and secured in 

1 Dr. Macdonald's History Jamaica Church. 



24 FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, N. Y. 

temporalty for the support and propagation of 
prelacy the largest inheritance of any particular 
church in America. 

In the confusion of this quarrel the handful of 
pious men who had continued their distinct meet- 
ings for prayer on the Lord's Day, after the visit of 
Makemie, were encouraged to attempt the forma- 
tion of a Presbyterian church in the city of New 
York. Some of the most prominent citizens be- 
longed to this band, and were soon associated with 
numbers increasing from year to year. They de- 
termined to have a pastor in 1716, and called James 
Anderson from Delaware, a Scotchman ordained 
nine years before by the presbytery of Irvine for 
American missions — " a graceful orator, a popular 
preacher and a worthy man." In three years a 
church was built, and even the legislature of Con- 
necticut ordered a collection throughout that colony 
to aid the enterprise. In 1720 the congregation 
petitioned the governor and council for a charter of 
incorporation. But the opposition of Trinity 
Church, actually appearing by counsel, defeated 
them, and the title to their property had to be 
vested in Anderson himself and three members of 
the church and by them transferred to ministers of 
Edinburgh in 1730. For more than half a century 
the First Presbyterian Church of New York city 
could not obtain the right of a citizen to sue and be 



DAMAGE FROM TRINITY 

sued in the courts of the country, owing to the 
hostile power and overshadowing wealth of Trinity 
Church. And this injustice greatly damaged there 
the feeble inception of our cause. It compelled the 
pastor to meddle too much with the temporal con- 
cerns of the church and brought dissension into the 
bosom of his flock. A division ensued and a sec- 
ond congregation was made, and Jonathan Edwards, 
at the age of nineteen, was called to the new or- 
ganization. But Anderson resigned his charge, and 
Edwards left with much regret for want of compe- 
tent support. Both congregations were soon happily 
reunited in the ministry of Ebenezer Pemberton, son 
of a Boston pastor, and a graduate of Harvard, who 
prospered for thirty years in that conspicuous charge, 
and left it a flock of nearly fourteen hundred souls. 
Thus the peculiar and extreme dispersion to 
which Presbyterians were doomed at the early 
colonization of this country was followed with 
legal and illegal intolerance precisely at the period 
of the first formation. No wonder it was so in the 
cradle of that day, when the old convening propen- 
sity toward presbyteries and synods, which had 
troubled the prelacy of England so much for a cen- 
tury and a half, began to show itself on this con- 
tinent, like a handwriting on the wall, to signify 
that spiritual despotism was finished, that the union 
of Church and State would be impossible, that be- 



26 EXTENT OF INTOLERANCE 

tween the bondage of hierarchical tyranny on one 
side and the anarchy of advisory councils on the 
other a strong republic not of this world would 
arise, well compacted, like a stone cut out without 
hands, to become a great mountain, filling the land 
and remaining "an eternal excellency, the joy of 
many generations." 

It was in "the Augustan age of England" that 
our infant Church was hindered and oppressed 
from New York to Charleston, with disabilities 
thrown upon her even in Maryland, where Epis- 
copalians revoked what Roman Catholics had given 
of religious liberty. 

East of New York, and over almost the whole 
extent of Puritan independency, there was a civil 
establishment which made parishes identical with 
townships, and taxed the inhabitants by statute for 
the support of the Church as well as the road, 
the prison and the poorhouse. When Presbyterian 
emigrants came, therefore, to attempt the distinct 
organization of their churches in New England, it 
was found that a constraint and burden beset them 
but little different from the oppression of the old 
countries, where dissent was liable to the tithing of 
installed religion as well as the voluntary offering 
of stipend for its own ministry and ordinances. 
They were not only too poor but too conscientious 
to support with their substance a discipline of the 



EXTENT OF INTOLERANCE 27 

Church that was radically different from their own 
representative system. And there was jealousy, 
harsh and bitter at times, on the part of ministers 
and people among those theocratic townships. 
When a few Presbyterians attempted to settle at 
Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1718, with their pastor 
Fitzgerald, they were violently hindered by a mob 
from building a house of worship, and that mob, 
it is said, was headed by some "considerable per- 
sons " of the town; and this intolerance continued 
for twenty years in the way of taxing Presbyte- 
rians for the support of the first Congregational 
Church of that town, until most of them removed to 
the western frontier of New York. 

A whole presbytery, called by tradition the Irish 
Presbytery, and calling themselves the Presbytery 
of Boston, consisting of ten ministers at least be- 
sides Lemercier of the French church in that city, 
became so quietly and completely pressed down 
and out by the policy of New England in the first 
part of the last century that history can hardly find 
the date either of its origin or its extinction. 1 Ex- 
ceptional places like Londonderry and Rutland, 
where some division of the township by courts of 
law or acts of the colonial assembly afforded relief, 
were very few during the whole period of Presby- 
terian settlement. 

1 Colman's MSS,, Massachusetts Historical Society's collection. 



28 REFUGE IN THE BORDER VALLEY 

Indeed, there was but one strip of country in all 
our broad land where presbytery could stretch itself 
without molestation from the jealousy of spiritual 
powers, and that was the border of a savage wilder- 
ness. It happened, in the goodness of God, that 
most of this border was the Jezreel of America, rich 
and beautiful through its whole extent of Cumber- 
land Valley in Pennsylvania and Shenandoah in 
Virginia, and yet the bloodiest battle-ground we 
have ever had since the beginning of our American 
civilization. There the Scotch-Irish Presyterians 
were suffered to pour the streams of immigration 
and set up their tabernacle without a challenge, be- 
cause there they had to stand guardsmen for the 
nation through nearly the whole of a century. The 
cabins there might worship as they pleased. A 
cordon of blood and fire might build its own altars 
and have the war-whoop of the Indians for a diapa- 
son through its own cathedrals. The apathetic 
peace of Quaker authorities in Pennsylvania and the 
chevalier pride of Episcopal authorities in Virginia 
united in giving countenance to Presbyterians all along 
the North Mountain, while the trail of the savage and 
smoke of his wigwam, the deadly rifle and ruthless 
tomahawk, made it undesirable to have the "one 
good and sufficient minister " in every parish ordained 
episcopally and supported by "a tax on all the in- 
habitants " of poor and perilous frontier stockades. 



CHARACTER OF ITS INHABITANTS 29 

But there presbytery flourished. There a pure 
gospel was preached by such men as Craighead and 
Thompson and Steel and Elder with a pocket Bible 
in one hand and a loaded rifle in the other. There 
and then, as always in critical or eventful times, 
heroes grew on the bench of ruling elders. There 
Chambers, at the peril of his life and fortune, gath- 
ered a whole community into his own fort, and 
when other populations fled the valley, stood with 
indomitable courage at the outposts of civilization 
In his town, and almost alone rolled back the rush 
of savage inhumanity. 1 And there it was that Arm- 
strong, a ruling elder in Carlisle, drew to him Hugh 
Mercer, a young physician from Scotland, and pro- 
jected that intrepid action at Kittanning which de- 
livered the valley from savage incursion, and stands 
in history, as it did in the opinion of Washington, 
the most valorous and timely discomfiture of the foe 
ever achieved in warfare with the Indians. Arm- 
strong lived to become the intimate friend of Wash- 
ington, by whose influence he was made a general 
of the Revolution and a member of the old Con- 
gress. And his son it was who carried Mercer in 
his arms from the battle-ground of Princeton, be- 
came a senator in Congress, ambassador to France 
and secretary of war in the administration of Mad- 
ison. 

1 Irish and Scotch Early Settlers, etc., by George Chambers. 



30 PRESBYTERIAN POWER OF ORGANIZATION 

It will now be admitted that, in view of all the 
disadvantages of our beginning and opposition to 
our first progress, there must be rare dynamic virtue 
in the creed which could gather people so dispersed, 
and organize quickly and well a body like the Pres- 
byterian Church, that has always grown consoli- 
dated in proportion as it has grown vast. In 1707 
it had eight ministers and twelve churches. In 1717 
it had more than doubled this number both of min- 
isters and churches; and the perfect harmony with 
which it went into a synod that year and agreed 
upon the subordination of three presbyteries into 
which it was resolved, and drew to this plural a 
fourth in Long Island which had been Independent 
more than Presbyterian ten years before, shows a 
primal force in some great principles underlying our 
whole conception of the Church. No one can 
doubt, with our primitive records before him, that 
the first ecclesiastical movement which we relate 
this day was due to intelligent ideas that had been 
maturing for centuries, and began to work on this 
hemisphere anew, and yet normal as if they had 
begun again at the suburbs of Geneva or colleges of 
Edinburgh; and just as little can we doubt that the 
assimilation of new material from Holland, France, 
Germany, Wales and Sweden, as well as New Eng- 
land, was more and more complete as our system 
extended its fold. It was better Presbyterianism in 



MORE PERFECT AS IT INCREASES 31 

1 7 1 7 than in 1707; better still in 1729, when "The 
Adopting Act" was voted and the numbers had 
grown to nearly double of what they were at the 
formation of the synod; better in 1741, when the 
rupture of ministerial communion made each wing 
of the separation vie with the other in devotion to 
the adopted standards of the whole; and better yet 
when the schism was healed in 1758 with a reunion 
which made it impossible that the Church could 
ever split again for the same causes of division. 

This great Catholic tendency, which is the main 
characteristic of the Presbyterian system when it is 
fairly understood, arises from a few elementary 
principles that were all at work in the first planting, 
and for almost half a century before an express for- 
mulation by the act of 1729, which approved of 
Presbyterian Church government as well as adopted 
the Confession of Faith and the catechism. Indeed, 
these principles originated the Reformation in Scot- 
land itself, and were covenanted in the body of her 
discipline again and again before the Westminster 
Assembly could gather and build with them a di- 
rectory in their Confession of Faith. These are 
chiefly the following: — 

1. The Church, in its visible form, is a company 
of parents and children which answers to the divine 
purpose in Christ before the world began, to pre- 
pare a "fullness" for him through all remaining 



32 UNDERLYING PRINCIPLES 

time that will represent him on earth while he rep- 
resents it in heaven. 

2. This representative body is made such by the 
constant communication of gifts and graces from 
himself through the agency of the Holy Spirit. 

3. These gifts and graces are diversified to an 
indefinite extent, no two members on earth being 
perfectly alike in this endowment. 

4. Consequently, the larger this body is made, 
which the Holy Ghost inhabits, the more complete 
the diversity reflected, and therefore the more 
fully is this image of Christ delineated among 
men. 

5. Officers commensurate with the need of this 
body through every age are all given of God with war- 
rant in his word, the ascension gifts of a glorious 
Master, and all of them representatives emphatically 
and in a triple sense, representing him to the 
Church and the Church to him. and both him and 
the Church to the whole world. 

6. These officers, besides the function of each 
individual according to his order, hold jurisdiction 
by assemblies, only in the name of Christ, for the 
exercise of any power bestowed upon the Church. 

7. Assemblies, through all their varieties and 
gradations, are to be compacted together, always 
converging in some higher unity which is one of 
ultimate appeal and general authority. 



THE PRIMARY COURT 33 

8. This ultimate and highest tribunal, by what- 
ever name it may be called, is the primary court, 
being next and nearest the Head in the scope of its 
aims and representation of all the churches, so that 
if there be power in the Church anywhere lodged 
which has not been specifically distributed by a 
formal constitution, this high court is the depository 
of such power, to meet the exigences that cannot 
be foreseen or provided for by any written constitu- 
tion. 

9. Election of officers must be in the people of 
each particular church, who are free to choose 
among the candidates approved of God and imbued 
with his Spirit, suffrage always abiding where the 
Holy Ghost abides, the great commission of the 
ministry really resting on the bosom of the whole 
Church, and no one succession of individual men, 
who are all given to the Church only to serve her, 
the transmission of office by those already invested 
being always a relative and not absolute necessity, 
qualified by the greater necessity of ability and 
faithfulness. 

These are the principles which had shaped the 
Presbyterian Church in every land and among Eng- 
lish-speaking people just as long before ' ' The Adopt- 
ing Act " of America as our Centennial of civil inde- 
pendence has been coming since that adoption. In 
Scotland a General Assemblv existed before either 



34 GENERAL ASSEMBLY 

synods or presbyteries were formed, as a council 
of apostles, elders and brethren was held in Jerusa- 
lem before any intermediate judicature had been 
formed, for the reference of causes from particular 
churches. Our presbytery at Freehold or Philadel- 
phia at the opening of the eighteenth century was 
the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church 
in America, It was a "representation of all the 
particular churches in this denomination; " it was 
"the bond of union, peace and mutual confidence" 
at home and the organ of "correspondence" with 
churches abroad. It "issued all references and 
appeals " and exercised all the authority of review 
over courts of record below it; and beyond this, it 
often did the session's work in particular churches, 
and exercised the right of "eminent domain "in 
bringing its authority to bear on evils and disorders 
which it was wise to redress before any record 
could be made below or any complaint and appeal 
could have time to go up above. In ten years more 
that General Assembly was called a synod, and this 
body exercised in turn all the prerogatives now in- 
vested in our supreme judicatory by the constitution ; 
and more than this, it often did the work of presby- 
teries, erecting or dividing particular churches, or- 
daining, translating and judging ministers, adopt- 
ing standards — the Westminster Confession of 
Faith and Directory in 1729, just as the General 



HISTORY OF COURTS IN GRADATION 35 

Assembly of Scotland had done in 1645 — without 
sending down overtures to the presbyteries on the 
subject. This privilege was a grant, subsequently 
made, in the way of distribution, vesting rights be- 
low which -are, of course, irrevocable, from the 
reservoir of power inherent in that supreme assem- 
bly which most fully represents Christ himself and 
all the particular churches of this denomination, as 
it was at the close of the seventeenth century in 
the " Barrier Act" by the General Assembly of 
Scotland. 

We may now see that two republican structures 
grew up together on this continent during the 
eighteenth century, the converse of each other, but 
all the more concordant and helpful to each other 
on this account — Church republicanism and State 
republicanism. Very much alike in being both the 
ordinance of God, and both constructed largely by 
Presbyterian hands, and both containing the demo- 
cratic element in large proportion, yet they differ 
essentially in the order and place they gave to real 
democracy. The Church begins in heaven; the 
State begins on earth. The Church begins with 
unity; the State with multiplicity. The Church is 
founded on one divine "Rock"; the State is 
founded on many minute constituencies of men. 
The Church secures her safety and the liberty of her 
people by the exercise of power in but one branch 



36 TWO REPUBLICAN STRUCTURES 

of it, committed to men, the judicial, and that 
modified by the equities of paternal discretion ; the 
State secures her safety and the liberty of her peo- 
ple by the coordinate exercise of power in three 
branches, legislative, judicial, and executive, with 
as little of the paternal as possible. The Church is 
complete only in the representation of all the gifts 
and graces emanating from her Head and flowing 
down to the skirts of priesthood in her people of 
every name and place and age, making it impossible 
for any true Presbyterian to be a bigot and out of 
cooperative union with a single feature of jesus 
wherever it is seen; the State may be complete in 
but one fragment of an empire, an island as well 
as a continent, a revolted province or colony as well 
as a subjugated kingdom annexed; so that it is im- 
possible for a true citizen to be cosmopolitan, as a true 
Christian is catholic, or to travel from one country 
to another, without being an alien. Insubordination 
is death to the State, rebellion being "as the sin of 
witchcraft"; but the resistance even of conscience 
to behests of the Church may weaken her energies 
and disturb her peace, but cannot touch her life, 
which is "hid with Christ in God." These two 
systems were never so thoroughly compared and 
sharply contrasted, and yet inseparably held, as 
they were by our fathers in the forming period of 
our Church, between 1706 and 1789. 



TWO CURRENTS MEET 37 

Simultaneous with this movement of two struc- 
tures was the movement of two currents within 
the province of ecclesiastical formation. One was 
from the North and the other from the South, and they 
met at Philadelphia. The Northern current issued 
from a theocracy in New England, which was then 
at the best of its experiment, having blended with 
a civil administration the government and discipline 
of the Church and rivaled the beautiful theocracy of 
Calvin at Geneva in the century before; and like 
that Helvetian model, it was transient as beautiful, 
leaving the Church it had cherished to weakness for 
schism and Socinianism, and the State it had sancti- 
fied to laughter, through all coming generations, at 
the "blue" regulations which governed forefather 
times. The current from the South was all Scotch- 
Irish, with a little Welsh in its element, made up of 
rivulets which owed alike their dispersion and con- 
fluence in the wilderness to bitter intolerance of 
Church and State united in the Old World, and was 
now swelling to a volume which would henceforth 
dash every scheme that would establish religion by 
law and divest the Church of government or dis- 
cipline prescribed by her own Lord alone. There 
was some ridging and foaming when these currents 
met to form that river which has made glad the 
city of our God, although the Southern current, like 
the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic, prevailed with its 



38 PBESBYTEBIANISM PREVAILS 

direction, and made the Independent Presbyterian 
Andrews, of Philadelphia, who had written to Dr. 
Colman, of Boston, about the overture of John 
Thompson for subscription to the Westminster 
Confession of Faith, offered first in 1727 and pressed 
to the vote in 1729, that he " had been in hopes they 
would hear no more of it," and Dickinson, of 
Elizabeth, who had published, in strictures upon it, 
that such a subscription would be like the wall 
about Laish — nothing of protection, but a snare- 
were soon more than contented, both of them. 
And all the others of that stream — Pemberton, 
Pierson, Morgan, Elmer, Webb and Pumry, with 
the churches of East Jersey and Long Island — 
yielded and owned with glad reminiscence that it 
proved to be all the benefit its authors had promised. 
And no wonder they were so easily satisfied with 
Westminster at that time, when the Northern 
current bore on its bosom Cambridge and Saybrook 
platforms going to pieces — synods and ruling elders 
in rafts which could be floated on only by the 
stronger withs of Presbyterian organization. 

Instead of checking the influx of Puritan ministers 
and people, the formal adoption of our standards 
increased the number, until, within one generation, 
from being as one to seven, it became almost one 
to three, in the proportion of ministers. Instead of 
depressing the energy and influence of New Eng- 



MEN OF NEW ENGLAND CONTENT 39 

land men to acquiesce reluctantly in the subscription 
which Irish and Scotch members, in their strong 
majority, had imposed, they became honored 
guides of the Presbyterian Church through the 
stormy and eventful midst of the last century. It 
might even be called the Dickinson age of our 
Church. Scotch and Irish ministers never dominated 
as a party in their successful structure of our system. 
The leading authors were from New England, with 
the exception of Gilbert Tennent, whose book and 
pamphlets issued from the press, it was said, "as 
bees from a hive." Not to speak of Edwards in 
this connection, Jonathan and Moses Dickinson and 
Joseph Morgan, of Freehold, were prolific authors; 
and the first of these three had no superior in han- 
dling the press of that day for the service of that 
generation and the generations following. 

But scarcely had the fabric of this fair construction 
been completed with so much harmony of council 
and adornment of ability and learning, piety and 
zeal, when it was subject to a strain which has no 
parallel in history. Lest it should be exalted above 
measure by the consciousness of strength in its 
unity and orthodoxy and force of discipline, it was 
humbled and almost ruined by the agitations of 
that "great awakening " which was so world-wide 
in the days of Whitefield and Wesley, Davenport, 
Edwards, Dickinson and the Tennents. Perhaps 



40 TRIAL OF THE GREAT AWAKENING 

the temper of its organization was too rigid for such 
a time, and the attitude of fencing against the laxity 
which was coming in from abroad had induced a 
reserve and suspicion that were excessive in the 
body of our old synod. Probably also many of its' 
best ministers and people were too indiscriminate in 
challenging a revival of religion which had so much 
of tumult and disorder in its manifestations, rad- 
icalism in its pretensions and fanatical bitterness in 
its judgments. Certainly, also, there was much 
declension of practical godliness, considering the 
recent high and perfectly harmonious attainment of 
the Presbyterian Church in purity of doctrine and 
simplicity of order and worship. But these were 
faults which only ''the meekness and gentleness 
of Christ " in the unction of his ministers could deal 
with. The wrath of man, however, unhappily 
attempted to work the righteousness of God when 
Samuel Blair and Gilbert Tennent undertook to con- 
vert the Church instead of the world with their burn- 
ing zeal and wonderful abilities. 

They began with acrimonious invective. Irri- 
tated by the strictures of slow but sober-minded 
brethren on the enthusiasm of Whitefield and his 
coworkers, the most ardent of whom was Gilbert 
Tennent — their pretensions to know precisely who 
were converted among the people and who were 
unconverted among: the ministers, and their en- 



EXCESSES OF THE REVIVALISTS 11 

couragement of strange disorder in the meetings 
for worship, the hideous outcries, bodily agitations 
and convulsive fits of "the falling work," alike in 
the camp meeting and the Church — Tennent and 
Blair, at the open synod, charged their fellow- 
members in formal c< presentation " papers, read 
before a crowd of promiscuous followers, with un- 
regeneracy of heart, heresy of doctrine (for allow- 
ing our own happiness to be a motive at all in 
obedience to God), pharisaic hypocrisy and dead 
formality in their ministrations. In the same year 
Gilbert Tennent preached at Nottingham a sermon 
on "the dangers of an unconverted ministry," 
which was filled with the most malign denunciation 
of evangelical men that fanaticism could express in 
our language — a sermon published twice at Phila- 
delphia and once at Boston, and scattered like the 
leaves of November among the churches. In this 
"Nottingham sermon " the people were advised to 
judge their ministers and assured that they were 
capable of discerning the unconverted among their 
shepherds, and that it was their duty to forsake the 
ministry of such and quit hearing any man whose 
preaching did not profit their souls according to 
their own judgment and taste. Along with this in- 
cendiary libel sown broadcast through the land 
were actual intrusions into the churches of such 
men as Alison and Boyd, Gillespie and Thomson, 



42 NEW BRUNSWICK INSUBORDINATION 

not one church in the whole presbytery of Donegal 
escaping rupture; divisions made and gloried in, 
despite the solemn and repeated warning of synod. 
Added to all was open disobedience to the order of 
the synod that a liberal education should be required 
of candidates for the ministry — either a diploma 
from some approved college or an examination sus- 
tained by the synod — before any presbytery could 
be allowed to take the candidate on trials for license 
and ordination. The Presbytery of New Brunswick 
was no sooner created in 1738 than it began to pro- 
test against this order, and actually proceeded to 
license John Rowland, with total disregard of the 
injunction. The synod, having a right to judge of 
the proper qualification of its own members, re- 
fused to acknowledge license and ordination so 
irregularly made, and refused a seat to any one so 
introduced. The dispute occasioned by this an- 
archy involved other points of deviation, at which 
"the Brunswick party " began to swerve with 
radical jarring. The value of all external calling to 
the ministry was questioned, the enthusiasm of an 
inward call was held to be sufficient, and the power 
of a synod to govern a presbytery with anything 
stronger than mere advice was denied. Antinomian 
tendencies were developed on every hand, and the 
preaching of duty was denounced; learning and 
soundness and regularity of life were contemned as. 



THE TENNENT FAMILY 43 

inadequate vouchers for minister or member unless 
he could tell exactly when and how he was con- 
verted, and retain the assurance of this reality as 
distinctly in his knowledge as he could "a thought 
of his mind or a stab in his flesh." 

It was well for the Church that the life of this 
party was the family of the Tennents. They had 
a school which was very good, but very poor— a 
log college— with their father at the head of it, the 
best of teachers in the last century, but extremely 
straitened in his means and immeasurably scant of 
the resources and appointments which belonged to 
the colleges of New England. Unfortunately, the 
requirement of a diploma or an examination by the 
synod itself, in order to be taken on trials for 
licensure, seemed to overlook too much the great 
service of that Neshaminy schooling, and mentioned 
only the chartered colleges of this and other lands. 
The senior William Tennent, master of the log col- 
lege and father of four illustrious ministers — Gilbert, 
William, John and Charles — had come from Ire- 
land ordained a priest of the Protestant Episcopal 
Church, and had renounced Episcopacy in coming 
here mainly because of objections to the use of 
liturgical forms in worship. He had little or no 
sympathy with the tumult of the time, except as he 
lived in his sons and pupils, and burned because 
they were offended with the imaginary slight of 



44 JOHN AND WILLIAM AT FREEHOLD 

Neshaminy by the synod. John, the third son, had 
finished his course at Freehold, N. J., before he was 
twenty-five years old, in 1732, and in a ministry of 
scarcely two full years had gathered a harvest for 
his Lord in that "poor distracted Scottish church" 
where he saw the firstfruits of the great revival 
which was so soon to overspread the continent. 
His brother William succeeded him in that charge 
with similar success, and a very peculiar fame for 
the supernatural in the course of his life. Charles 
was the youngest of these brothers, and settled in 
the Presbytery of New Castle, where his influence 
reinforced the New Brunswick party beyond the 
limits of that " protesting" presbytery. 

But the strong man of this great family was 
Gilbert, the eldest son, fourteen years old when he 
came to this country, taught everything by his 
father, whom he also assisted in the log college, 
and the first Presbyterian minister whose whole 
education for the office had been received in 
America. When George Whitefield arrived at 
Philadelphia in 1759, he hastened to Neshaminy to 
imbibe the lessons of that school and the spirit of 
the prophets there. Gilbert Tennent was the man of 
all others whom he most admired as a preacher and 
as a guide in adapting his own resplendent ministry 
to the character of the churches and the conversion 
of the American people. To him he was indebted 



WHITEFIELI) WITH THE TENNENTS 45 

also for most of the mistakes, antipathies and illu- 
sions which marred his career in this land. The 
fame of Whitefield, however, became that of the 
Tennents also in consequence of this intimacy and 
companionship, giving immense advantage with 
the people to any side of a contest on which Gilbert 
was engaged. The censoriousness, the intrusions, 
the distraction of parishes, pretensions to judge the 
hearts of men/the defiance of synodical authority, — 
all these and other fanatical excesses were so glo- 
rious for a while, in the company of Whitefield and 
the Tennents, that reflecting men who had rejoiced in 
the revival at first beheld with consternation the 
true glory of their infant Church departing. Dis- 
couraged, disorganized, left by the multitude and 
having no longer the "many" to sustain them in 
forms of judicial process, they determined to meet 
the extremity with a measure that corresponded 
with its lawlessness. 

At the synod of 1741, Robert Cross, the successor 
of Andrews in Philadelphia, offered a "protest" 
against the " protestors " or Brunswick party, 
which enumerated with great precision and power 
the many evils which that party had brought upon 
the Church and which threatened her destruction, 
proposing to renounce all further connection with 
those brethren until they would confess and abjure 
the errors of their way. It was placed on the table 



46 PROTEST OF ROBERT CROSS 

for signatures, and a scene of the utmost confusion 
followed. It is said the moderator left his chair, and 
the galleries, crowded with excited people, who 
generally sympathized with the new side, turned 
the confusion into uproar. Each side claimed to be 
the synod, and with much difficulty order was 
restored enough to count the signatures to this pro- 
test and the numbers opposed. It appeared that the 
former, called henceforth the Old Side, had the 
majority, and the latter, called the New Side, with- 
drew. Thus the schism of the last century began; 
and we must mark the finger of God for good even 
in this little thing — that the act of separation was a 
muss and not a vote. Half a generation might heal 
the one, a whole generation it would take to heal 
the other. As it was well ordered that the whole 
combination of the disturbing party hung upon the 
character and will of Gilbert Tennent, so it was 
well ordered that the protest which meant to revo- 
lutionize the Church with an overture rather than to 
conserve her with the process of her own discipline 
should be in no proper technical sense an act of the 
constituted synod. 

Providentially, also, the whole Presbytery of New 
York was absent from that meeting of the synod. 
Next year, 1742, it appeared, and Jonathan Dickinson, 
one of its members, became the moderator. He at 
once proposed that the separated brethren of the 



OVERTURE OF JONATHAN DICKINSON 47 

previous year should be restored to their seats — not 
because he thought they were blameless, for he 
condemned their excesses; not because they had 
become either penitent or apologetic, for they were 
going on to license others without regard to the 
authority of the synod, and to rend the churches in 
every direction and beyond all bounds with active 
intrusion and malign aspersion of the pastors; but 
because the whole transaction of 1741 had been 
irregular and unconstitutional. The excluded 
brethren ought to have been arraigned by their 
presbyteries or by the synod itself with process of 
discipline, and ejected only with a full and faultless 
record. But he failed. The majority objected with 
keen force that absentees of the preceding year 
should not assume the position of judges and seek 
to reverse what might have been better done if they 
had been present. Trial according to forms of 
process in the Directory was impossible when the 
offenders were leading the multitude and insisting 
to the last count that they were the synod them- 
selves. And even a reconsideration of the act 
could not be moved when it had never been voted, 
and was now a rupture in fact without a record in 
order. There was no remedy but return of the 
excluded party to a better mind. Thus the schism 
v/as continued. 
For three years the Dickinson proposal was 



48 THE SYNOD OF NEW YORK 

pressed on the synod, and conferences were held, 
with alternate overtures to the synod and to the ex- 
cluded members. The latter had been brought by 
Aaron Burr and others to the point of confessing 
with regret nearly all the charges of irregularity and 
wrong, demanding in return that the protest of 
Cross should be withdrawn from the files and rec- 
ords of the synod. But this was refused for the 
simple reason that all its allegations were true, and 
truer every year. At length (1745) the Presbytery 
of New York formed itself into a synod and took 
upon its own roll the exscinded Presbytery of New 
Brunswick and all others in their following. This 
was done with little or no heat of resentment or 
antagonism in any particular, but the technical point 
of restoring to visible unity with the Presbyterian 
Church a body of men who were mad with en- 
thusiasm, but sound in the faith and preeminently 
gifted for the service of Christ. It was expressly 
and thoroughly understood in this formation that 
the New York Synod, as it was now called, was 
one with the Synod of Philadelphia; not only in an 
honest adherence to the Westminster standards, but 
also in every particular of decency and order which 
had been specified in the dividing protest of 1741. 
Its attitude from the beginning was that of reunion; 
and if it had only repressed with a firm hand "the 
intrusions " with which the Brunswick party con- 



MEEKNESS OF THE OLD SYNOD 49 

tinued to agitate and divide the churches adhering 
to " the Old Side," there would not have been three 
instead of thirteen years more of separation. Here 
was the standing cause of discord, making every 
year an ultimate reconstruction of parishes and 
presbyteries in case of reunion more impracticable. 
The swelling tide of prosperity which favored the 
Synod of New York, and the halo of brilliant men 
and sainted evangelists which adorned her ministry 
at the time, hid from the world the sin of this ob- 
liquity, and left many a precious light in the terri- 
tory of the old synod to be quenched by reason of 
distraction. 

The glory of our old Synod of Philadelphia 
through all these times of excitement and convul- 
sion was the "ornament" of her "meek and quiet 
spirit." When Gilbert Tennent and Samuel Blair 
insulted her to the face at the first with charges of 
unregeneracy, unfaithfulness and opposition to the 
Spirit of God, she adopted unanimously and sent 
forth to the churches, as well as enjoined on her 
ministers, the pastoral minute requiring them to 
take heed to themselves and search and see whether 
these things were so. When John Thompson, her 
great conservative and defender by the press, took 
up the task of her vindication in his imperishable 
book on church government, he did it with lowli- 
ness of spirit, modesty and candor and consistency. 



50 INCONSISTENCY OF GILBERT TENNENT 

throughout, which were in singular contrast with 
the haughty contempt of the "Nottingham" ser- 
mon and its volleys of subsequent defense. 

So it was through all the ensuing conferences had 
between the synods until the reunion came about in 
1758. Though her desolated and fragmentary 
churches could not be restored by any organic un- 
ion, and though her great protest of 1741 must be 
affirmed at every conference as the truth of history 
and the moderation of justice to the character of 
both parties, she was willing to meet the chronic 
demand for its withdrawal by a phrase which 
yielded no principle, but kept the fact for all future 
generations in a state of negative solution. It was 
that the protest of 1741 "was not the act of the 
synod." On this phrase the two bodies agreed, and 
the main dispute was over. 

Another cause of reunion was the complete hu- 
miliation of Gilbert Tennent. That "son of thun- 
der " had discomfited himself, and the strong staff 
of the disturbing party was broken. He was the 
father of controversy in the American Presbyterian 
Church. Not by any false doctrine avowed nor by 
any scandal coming on his life nor by any paralysis 
of intellect and power of speech nor by loss of 
zeal for the cause of Christ in the salvation of souls, 
but by the extreme severity of his temper in relig- 
ious controversy, he fell from leadership in this 



INCONSISTENCY OF GILBERT TENNENT 51 

Church. It awakened suspicion of error when he 
was seen to be tossed continually to the verge on 
this side and that of the vast area he trod in dispu- 
tation. It arrayed against him the fears of all con- 
siderate men, whether timid or courageous; and the 
man who excites our fears never could govern 
Presbyterians. And, above all, it confounded him- 
self with a maze of inconsistencies from which 
there could be no recovery. He had voted in the 
synod to approve of the admirable paper on the 
controversy between him and David Cowell respect- 
ing the foundation of moral obligation, and yet soon 
afterwards flung that paper back upon the synod as 
heretical, in permitting our own happiness in any 
sense to mingle with the glory of God in motives of 
obedience. He had assailed Count Zinzendorf and 
the Moravians with pamphlets as well as speeches 
of vehement censure, in which every objection was 
a condemnation of his "Nottingham sermon" and 
a justification of all that Robert Cross embodied 
in the memorable " protest of 1741." He had con- 
fessed in a letter of penitence to Jonathan Dickinson 
the great errors of his extravagance enumerated in 
that protest, and had this letter widely published 
among the churches at the very time a third edition 
of the Nottingham sermon was coming from the 
press in Boston under his own direction. Pam- 
phleteers on both sides of the Atlantic were not slow 



52 HIS CONFESSIONS AND THE COLLEGE 

to blazon " Gilbert vs. Tennent; " and so great was 
the prejudice against him of good men abroad that 
the mission of Samuel Davies and himself to Great 
Britain for the College of New Jersey would have 
been a failure if he had not humbly retracted 
the Nottingham sermon in London, although the 
last conspicuous exploit of his pen just before leav- 
ing home was a fresh demand upon the synod of 
Philadelphia, as a term of reunion, that the protest 
of 1741, which had complained of that sermon, 
should be pronounced null and void and virtually 
untrue. Not in his lifetime and ascendency could 
there have been a reunion if he had not published 
his Irenicum, confessing his inconsistency and ex- 
travagance as he doffed the great coat and leathern 
girdle in which he had thundered from Delaware to 
Maine, and consented to retire as an ordinary pastor 
to the Second Ctiurch of Philadelphia. 

Another cause of reconciliation which mightily 
constrained the greater to seek reunion with the less 
at that time was the virtual transference of the log 
college from Neshaminy to Princeton, whither, 
some two years before its consummation, Burr and 
seventy students had removed the College of New 
Jersey from Newark. The jealousy of all the Ten- 
nents had been buried in the grave of their father at 
the very time this college began with the presidency 
of Jonathan Dickinson at Elizabeth, and the pros- 



MAIN CAflSE OF REUNION 53 

perous academies of Pennsylvania and Maryland and 
Delaware, nearly all of them nurtured by the Old 
Side, came to be coveted and courted as feeders for 
the College of New Jersey. 

But the great cause which secured and hastened a 
reunion was precisely that " wall " which had sur- 
rounded both these bodies all the while of their ap- 
parent separation, which Dickinson himself had 
said, in 1729, would fall "if so much as a fox 
would go over it " — the Westminster Confession of 
Faith, Larger and Shorter Catechisms and Directory 
of Government, Discipline and Worship. This 
palladium, as well as bulwark around them, rallied 
all the parties, restrained the factions, gathered the 
fragments without any loss, and proved once for all 
to the ages that a full creed is not a dividing wedge, 
but the very handle of concord, and a witnessing 
Church that testifies for Christ in her own words to 
the whole extent of her attainment will never be 
left "a portion for foxes." It was the centennial 
time of our old standards, and never had they been 
hailed with glory and enthusiasm on every side as 
when history came to make up the results of a 
world-wide revival. 

The reunion was accomplished in 1758, and the 
name then given to the General Assembly of the 
Presbyterian Church was "The Synod of New 
York and Philadelphia.'" A few months before 



54 THE REUNION ACCOMPLISHED 

that consummation Jonathan Edwards died; a few 
months before him his son-in-law, Aaron Burr, had 
died; Jonathan Dickinson ten years before him. 
Andrews, Brainerd and Robinson had also departed, 
three apostolic men and missionaries, one to Phila- 
delphia, another to the Indians and a third to Vir- 
ginia. So had Samuel Blair, " the incomparable," 
and John Thompson "the conservative." 

What a roll of renowned and sainted men of the 
interval might be called who had been written on 
this side and that of the division on earth, and were 
by that time summoned away to the Church of the 
firstborn that are written in heaven! But a host 
remained for a new era — the Alisons, the Tennents, 
the Finleys, the Smiths, Prime, Pemberton, Pierson, 
Rodgers, Roan, Miller, Spencer, Beatty, Bostwick, 
Buell, Robert Cross, John Blair, James Brown, 
George Duffield, and that young man who had 
charmed with his eloquence the intolerance of the 
South, and prophesied of Washington atBraddock's 
defeat, and gathered endowment for Princeton from 
the opposite hemisphere, and was just now to enter 
on the presidency of Nassau Hall — Samuel Davies. 

One hundred ministers began to assemble in the 
synod now, and to represent nearly twice that num- 
ber of nominal churches. Gilbert Tennent was the 
first moderator, Robert Cross the second. "Pro- 
testers " on both sides of the quarrel and schism 



3IUTUAL CONCESSION 55 

were now successors to each other in harmonious 
line. If Gilbert was first in the honor of presiding 
over the united body, Robert was first in construct- 
ing the platform on which he was elevated. The 
plan of reunion embodied every plank of principle 
on which the Old Side had been standing for seven- 
teen years, and every item of additional incorpo- 
ration would have been at any time assented to if it 
had been overtured without demanding the formal 
cancelling of their " protest." 

It was indeed ordered well that mere "protest" 
should not be allowed again to disrupt a synod. It 
was equally well defined that the work of God's 
own Spirit in the ministrations of truth should not 
be gainsaid because of paroxysms in the flesh which 
might incidentally attend it. The existence of a 
college among us on this side of New England was 
now conceded as a sufficient reason for the synod 
to intrust the presbyteries with independent judg- 
ment on the qualifications in learning of candidates 
for the ministry. And the sad disruption of so 
many churches by the "intrusions" chargeable on 
the Brunswick party in the day of their heat was 
accepted as a fact which could not be remedied in 
reconstruction, beyond enactment that the territorial 
integrity of parishes should not be disturbed in that 
way again. With few exceptions, the Old Side 
were content with this adjustment, because it was 



56 EXCELLENCE OE THE PLAN 

seen upon every hand that good had been brought 
out of that evil, and in that very thing divine Prov- 
idence had rebuked the grudging reluctancy with 
which so many congregations of the Old Side re- 
sisted the work of church extension against the tide 
of ever-swelling populations. In short, the dis- 
tinctive gains to the New Side in that memorable 
compact of reunion were all in the direction of the 
Old side as well — Westminster endorsed again; 
order restored; revivals discriminated; majorities 
vindicated; minorities made free; sound faith and 
good life accredited as true religion without inquisi- 
tion after mental states and a prescribed order of 
experiences. Never was there a more perfect 
union, never 'a more noble and frank avowal on 
both sides, and never a more complete symbol of 
reconciliation, than the plan of reunion in 17=^8. 
Of course it distinguished between essential and 
non-essential things in the submission of conscience 
to that bond. But it stipulated for no liberty be- 
yond this; no reduction; no revision; no compli- 
ance with expediency. And surely it had no 
change of the constitution kept in abeyance or in 
secret on either side, to be sprung upon the" whole 
Church as soon as it could be welded together in 
the reconstruction. 

Thus restored and harmonized again, the Church 
of our fathers, with a banner streaming at full 



PROBITY WITH THE INDIANS 57 

length in every fold, advanced to another stage of 
militancy, for which her equipment, that had been 
gained in the conflicts of principle, and structures of 
liberty, civil and religious — twin towers, that she 
alone had studied how to build distinctly and to- 
gether — prepared her to act as no other denomina- 
tion could act in those great events which filled the 
sequel of a century from her beginning in this land 
— missions, wars, and institutions. 

For a whole generation she had to fight the 
savages on her border almost alone. The proprie- 
taries of Pennsylvania and early governors and coun- 
cils of this commonwealth strangely allowed the 
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in her frontier valley, with 
very little help in men or money, to bear the brunt 
of a warfare the most cruel that is recorded in the 
annals of our country. And yet from the sentries 
of that exposed and slaughtered community there 
always went forth the most benignant friends of 
the poor Indians to enforce the faith of treaties and 
keep the reservations from intrusion and give them 
the light and peace of the gospel. When the 
Quaker government of Pennsylvania outwitted the 
Delaware Indians, in 1737, with a bargain for as 
much land '"to extend back in the woods" as a 
man could walk over in a day and a half, that small 
but powerful tribe was irritated greatly when the 
white men secured by advertisement and lavish 



58 CONSPICUOUSLY PPESBYTERIAN POLICY 

bounty a pedestrian who could walk as fast as an 
Indian could run; but they had no remedy. When, 
again, the Six Nations made their memorable cession 
at Albany in 1754 to the same authorities of what 
the latter had been carefully indefinite to describe in 
metes and bounds which the savages could com- 
prehend, and all middle Pennsylvania was taken as 
a part of the claim, with a manifest purpose to push 
it on to the setting sun, the red man was enraged; 
and Braddock's defeat the year after was but the 
beginning of horrors which could be stayed only 
with an honest concession that the summit of the 
Alleghany Mountain should be the limit of that Al- 
bany grant. On the other hand, the border valley 
of the Presbyterians was no sooner constituted a 
county, Cumberland, than its authorities enlisted 
with eager determination to repress all dishonest 
dealing with the Indians. When a few rash adven- 
turers, mostly Germans, but with some Scotch- 
Irish, moved into Sherman's valley and other places 
beyond the Kittochtinny or North Mountain, before 
the cession of that region at Albany, the Indians 
complained of the encroachment; and instantly 
Benjamin Chambers and George Croghan, with other 
magistrates and a considerable force of men from 
the Presbyterian churches, urged by their ministers, 
crossed the mountain in 1742 and constrained the 
settlers to quit their clearings, and even burn their 



CORPORATION OF THE WIDOW'S FUND 59 

cabins in sight of the Indians, that justice might be 
done and savage resentment avoided. 1 Such was 
the uniform spirit of equity toward the Indians on 
the part of a people whom certain flippant chron- 
iclers describe in this connection as "a pertinacious 
and pugnacious race," whose trespass on the In- 
dian territory was the main provocation which 
leagued the Indians with the French in the bloody 
wars of that age. As they were the sufferers 
chiefly, they have been falsely accused as the trans- 
gressors. The provincial government of Pennsyl- 
vania, in its jealousy of Scotch-Irish energy and ad- 
venture, its impotency in the hands of cunning 
knaves who contrived treaties and got for a price 
the privilege of selling rum to the Indians, has to 
this day escaped the just condemnation which history 
finds out in searching for the causes of those horrid 
calamities that made so much bloody ground on the 
bosom of this commonwealth. 

" The Widows' Fund," the oldest corporation for 
the relief of desolated families in America, began 
its benignant work among the necessitous on the 
frontier. In 1760 it sent to Great Britain Charles 
Beatty, who had been the Irish peddler that in at- 
tempting to sell his wares to William Tennent of 
Neshaminy, by praising them in Latin, did it so well 

1 See Irish and Scotch Early Settlers of Pennsylvania, by the 
Hon. George Chambers, 1856. 



60 BEATTY AND DUFFIELD 

that the noble teacher was taken and Beatty himself 
was taken with the conviction that he ought to stay 
there and study for the ministry. His success in 
gathering funds for the corporation was wonderful. 
Even the General Assembly of Scotland ordered a 
collection to help his cause throughout the churches. 
But when he returned home, a dispute arose with 
Provost Smith, of Philadelphia, respecting the dis- 
tribution of these funds — whether the disbursement 
should be a measure of broad philanthropy to com- 
prehend all the distressed who had been driven 
from their homes by the Indians, or a special distri- 
bution to the Presbyterian sufferers whose hus- 
bands, brothers or sons had perished in war with 
the savages. At length it was determined by the 
synod of 1766, in accordance with a request of the 
corporation, that he and George Duffield, of Carlisle, 
should explore the condition of the whole border to 
learn its necessities, and especially the spiritual con- 
dition of the frontier settlements, and also what 
opportunities might be had for giving the gospel to 
the Indians. Beatty was full of missionary zeal, 
having been much with Brainerd and deeply inter- 
ested in the Indian school supported long and liber- 
ally by the synod. So far as can now be ascer- 
tained, he was the first Protestant minister to preach 
beyond the Alleghanies, when he preached in 17S8, 
at Fort Duquesne, to the troops of Forbes' army 



PATRIOTISM IN THE FIELDS 61 

that took possession of that post after it was evacu- 
ated by the French. And now in this mission of 
the synod he was the first to preach on the soil of 
that magnificent State, Ohio, having penetrated the 
wilderness some hundred and thirty miles and ob- 
tained on the Muskingum a knowledge of the In- 
dians to encourage the establishment of permanent 
missionary enterprise. It is therefore a fact worthy 
of commemoration that when we say, ''Corpo- 
rations have no soul," this one, the oldest of all 
among Presbyterians, stands an illustrious excep- 
tion, the first thing to incite the synod of New York 
and Philadelphia to move alike in foreign and do- 
mestic missions whilst in pursuit of its own distinct 
and legitimate object, the succor of " poor and dis- 
tressed " families of Presbyterian ministers. 

That same meeting of the synod which sent 
Beatty and Duffield to reconnoiter settlements on 
the frontier and open a pathway to the Indian towns 
beyond was a jubilant meeting, full of gratulation, 
loyalty and patriotism. It voted an address to His 
Majesty for the repeal of the Stamp Act. And 
these brethren found the whole border full of the 
same enthusiasm. Every field, every stump, was 
vocal with the same rejoicing. Indeed, fields and 
stumps have always been the scenic joy of this de- 
nomination. 

•'The unaccountable humor," as Makemie called 



62 ITS EARLY DEMONSTRATIONS 

it, of the American people to live in the country and 
cultivate the lands rather than dwell in villages and 
build up cities, has, in spite of his remonstrance, 
remained the humor of the Presbyterian people. 
They have been emphatically from the beginning a 
rural church. It would seem as if, in this character- 
istic, the stability of earth itself has been imparted 
to this ecclesiastical system in making the bulk of 
her pastors chorepiscopal bishops in our assemblies, 
and making agricultural work the sinew both of 
money and virtue in defending the institutions of 
the Church and the liberty of the land. No sign of 
the times could be more at war with our traditions 
and ominous of weak degeneracy than the ambi- 
tion of ministers to quit the country for the city, as 
if a rural parish were fit only to begin with and a 
metropolitan pulpit were the goal of aspiration, and 
the Holy Ghost were in waiting for the work of 
"translating ministers'' rather than keeping them 
to "make the wilderness and the solitary place glad 
for them." Perish the policy which, either in edu- 
cation or industry, would make our youth discon- 
tented with a home in the country! When the rage 
of fanaticism or frivolities of fashion have wasted 
our churches and emptied our fanes in the town, 
how often have numbers been replaced by fresh 
importations from the country of well catechized 
believers who brought with them revivals of familv 



ITS ENTHUSIASM AT THE FRONTIER 63 

religion, and thus became "restorers of paths to 
dwell in 5 '! 

We know what kind of soldiers our Presbyte- 
rians of the field have sent to every war that has 
been a war of defense. Before the Declaration of 
Independence at Philadelphia was written it began 
to be composed in the fields of the valley and along 
the mountain tops, from Mecklenburg to Carlisle 
and from Carlisle to Hannahstown, over the Alle- 
ghany Mountains and among the clearings of West- 
moreland County. No historical finesse can rob the 
Presbyterian yeomanry of their credit in having 
sown with broadcast unanimity the seminal thought, 
if not phrases also, of that immortal document. It 
was therefore a philosophical justice in history that 
the only minister of any denomination who signed 
it was John Witherspoon, the representative of 
Presbyterian education and a regular teacher of the- 
ology at Princeton half a century before Archibald 
Alexander was elected to the office. More than a 
year before he signed it the tidings of bloodshed at 
Lexington and Concord started companies from the 
frontiers of our Church, and mainly from the 
churches of the Cumberland Valley, to anticipate 
Washington himself at the siege of Boston, and 
make the Revolution quick as it was inevitable. 
Veteran captains were found there quite ready, and 
numerous almost as ministers and elders, and all of 



64 ITS ENTHUSIASM AT THE FRONTIER 

them eager again to muster the host and fire its 
patriotic ardor. 

But " the commencement of the War of the Revo- 
lution " is the end of my task, and I desist with 
filial reverence and affection at a center of patriot- 
ism even on the border of our civilization when 
that war began. 



From the War of the Revolution to the 
Organization of the General Assembly 



I 

CONDITION OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AT THE 
OPENING OF THIS PERIOD ( 1 775) 

The storm of the Revolutionary war broke upon 
a people more universally peaceable, loyal, intel- 
ligent and Christian than any other in the history of 
the world. With few exceptions the entire popu- 
lation belonged, by voluntary adherence, to some 
one of the various fractions of the Christian Church. 

Speculative atheism there was none; of subtle in- 
fidelity hardly a trace; and the coarse and brutal in- 
fidelity of Paine and his school was only beginning 
to make its way amid the lower stratum of society. 
Nowhere was education more universal; nowhere 
was the Bible more the book of the home, or the 
sanctuary dearer to the heart; nowhere were man- 
ners simpler, habits more frugal, domestic virtue 
and official integrity more sacred; nowhere were 
the minister and the schoolmaster in higher esteem. 
Taking the colonies at large, the Church existed in 

65 



66 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

as pure a state as had ever been realized in this her 
mixed and militant condition. 

But she existed in the form of a multitude of 
sects— all the chief sects, at least, that had already 
originated in England, with the addition of a few 
transplanted from the Continent of Europe. Of 
these only the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians 
and the Episcopalians have any special significance 
in relation to the period we are now contemplating. 
And popularly the first two were regarded as one. 
The religious element involved in the rebellion was 
invariably spoken of, whether in or out of New Eng- 
land, as Presbyterian. 1 

Uijt Mein Hauss 
de 8te Ao. 1762. 
To the Hon. Sir Wm. Johnson : — 

That ij reit these letter en trouble you bij these ij be forced for 
it : the reason is because ij heard yesterday in the castle that the 
Bostoniers were designed to erect schools in everij castle by choos- 
ing uijt two jung boijs for to be send in nieu engelland to be in- 
structed there and them should instruct the others in proper learn- 
ing, now learning is good en is most necessarij amongs the 
haddens that cannot be contradicted but ij want to know what de- 
sign as it is to introduce their own Presbijteren church than can it 
not be allowed en as it prejudice our church en church ceremonies, 
etc. — Doc. History of New York, iv. 307. 

Mr. Keith writes to the Secretary of the Venerable Society, etc., 
that "if a minister be not sent with the first conveniency, Presby- 
terian ministers from New England would swarm into these 
countries and prevent the increase of the Church. — Efiscop. Ilis- 
tor. Coll., 185 1, p. xxiii. 

1 See Letter of the Rev. Jacob Oel, Episcopal missionary among 
the Mohawks, to Sir William Johnson. 



AT THE OPENING OF THE BE VOLUTION 67 

The Baptists already existed in considerable num- 
bers, having perhaps three hundred or more con- 
gregations. But they were without organization 
of any kind, without an educated ministry, their 
preachers being small tradesmen or mechanics and 
the flocks consisting of the more ignorant and en- 
thusiastic classes in the middle and southern colo- 
nies. It is only toward the close of this period 
and in connection with the struggle for religious 
liberty in Virginia that they make any considerable 
figure. 1 

The Methodists in England and America still 
made a part of the Anglican Church, and through- 
out the Revolutionary period acted in sympathy 
with it. Mr. Whitfield, in writing from America to 
the bishop of Oxford and others, though com- 
menting in very severe terms on the character of 
the Episcopal clergy in the colonies, yet invariably 
describes them as belonging to "our Church." 
During the war for independence they are in no 
way to be distinguished from other Episcopalians. 
In England, John Wesley at first employed his pen 
in defense of the measures of Parliament, and re- 
produced as his own, without acknowledgment, 
the arguments of Samuel Johnson's Taxation no 

1 See History of the Baptist Interest in the United States, by 
the Rev. Rufus Babcock, D. D., Poughkeepsie, N. Y., in Quart. 
Register for 1S41. 



68 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

Tyranny. 1 He afterwards changed his views, and 
in a letter to Lord North remonstrated against the 
war, declaring that "in spite of all his long-rooted 
prejudices as a churchman and a loyalist, he cannot 
avoid thinking, if he think at all, that the colonists 
are an oppressed people asking nothing more than 
their legal rights." He adds that it is idle to think 
of conquering America: " Twenty thousand British 
troops could not do it." 

The Roman Catholics were still few in number 
and appear during this period in no ecclesiastical 
capacity. In 1775, they had no more than fifty 
congregations in the colonies, and half that num- 
ber of clergy. Even in Maryland they constituted 
not more than one-twentieth part of the popula- 
tion. 

Quakerism had been introduced into America 
early in the century, and had caught with great 
rapidity. The lofty pretensions and bold " testify- 
ings"of the early preachers, and the punishment 
they brought upon themselves by their excesses, 
recommended their views to the loose religious 
radicalism which hung on the skirts of the New 

1 Wesley's Calm Address to the American Colonies. The offen- 
sive sentiments of this address, and its broad and subsequently 
confessed plagiarisms, exposed the author to very severe criticism. 
See Dr. Toplady's Old Fox tarred and feathered^ occasioned by 
what is called Mr. John Wesley's Calm Address to our America}} 
colonies. —Toplady's Works, v. 441. 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 69 

England churches. They throve for a while on 
"persecution." In the middle colonies the high 
character of the grantee of Pennsylvania, not yet 
defaced by the sharp pens of later critics, and the 
pacific character and benevolent aims of his admin- 
istration, attracted numerous adherents. Quakers 
swarmed on both sides the Delaware — disputatious, 
high-flying,, theological Quakers, non-combatant as 
respects carnal weapons, but ever ready for dialec- 
tical brawl and battle. They were already broken 
up by schisms. George Keith, a busy, stirring, 
hot-headed brother, who subsequently conformed 
to the Anglican Church and became an ultra-zealous 
Episcopal missionary in the colonies, had a con- 
siderable following called Keithian or Christian 
Quakers. On the other hand, the Foxonian or 
Deistical Quakers, who are described by Messrs. 
Keith and Talbot as " no better than heathens," 
were passionately enthusiastic for the " inner light" 
and against the authority of divine revelation. The 
two factions were destroying each other; and it is 
worth noticing that of all the sects extant in the 
colonies in the Revolutionary period, the Quakers 
are the only one that has not thriven; all the others 
have multiplied a thousandfold. They alone have 
dwindled till they are now arrived at the verge of 
extinction. As concerns the Revolutionary struggle, 
a few "Deistical Quakers," like Benjamin Franklin, 



70 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

acted an influential part, but as a sect they had 
neither part nor lot in the matter. 

When we speak of the Christian Church in connec- 
tion with the struggle for independence, we have 
occasion, therefore, to notice only Presbyterianism 
and Episcopacy; always remembering that that im- 
perfect form of Presbyterianism called Congrega- 
tionalism existed exclusively in New England. 

As introductory to the history of the Presbyterian 
Church during the Revolutionary period, it is neces- 
sary to consider briefly its condition at the opening of 
the scene. In all the provinces south of and includ- 
ing New York, except Pennsylvania, the Episcopal 
Church was either expressly established by law or 
at least peculiarly favored by the colonial govern- 
ments. Episcopal churches and parsonages were 
built by the aid of the royal governors, and often 
by public tax. The clergy were salaried by assess- 
ments on the property of the citizens at large. 
Their stipends were fixed by law, and were col- 
lected, where it was necessary (and practicable), 
by execution and distress. 

In New York the profligate Lord Cornbury— 
bankrupt in character and fortune— was a zealous 
friend of "the present happy establishment in 
Church and State." 1 In New Jersey, by one of 

1 See letter of the Rev. Dr. Auchmuty to Sir William Johnson 
of date 20th May, 1770. 



AT THE OWNING OF THE REVOLUTION 71 

those retributions which often attend unhallowed 
love, the natural son of Benjamin Franklin, the last 
royal governor of the province, was a bitter enemy of 
both the political and religious liberty for which his 
father contended. Maryland, originally a Roman 
Catholic proprietary grant, was organized ecclesi- 
astically as a branch of the Church of England, con- 
taining in 1775 about twenty parishes. In Virginia, 
where the union of Church and State was closest, 
the clergy were "presented" to their "livings" by 
the governor, and the value of the benefice was 
calculated, as also in Maryland, in the great staple 
of the province. The salary was settled by act of 
legislature in 1721 at 16,000 pounds of tobacco, or a 
cash equivalent of eighteen shillings the hundred 
pounds. 1 To every parsonage was attached a glebe 
of not less than 200 acres. In fact, the "ancient 
dominion " exhibited nearly as perfect an example 
of a Church-and-State establishment as the mother- 
country itself. Virginia was simply a cis-Atlantic 
magnified Hampshire or Bucks, where the clergy 
and the squirearchy held carnival and royal gov- 
ernors made it their ambition to be nursing-fathers 
to " the Church." 

1 In Maryland the salary was, in some cases, much larger, 
amounting to thirty, and even forty, thousand pounds of tobacco. 
The cash value of the salaries was from £50 to £80 colonial cur- 
rency, which was depreciated in the various colonies from twenty- 
five to fifty per cent below sterling value. 



72 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

The parish ministers came from England, and 
were mostly such as England could well afford to 
spare. The " Venerable Society for the Propagation 
of the Gospel in Foreign Parts," chartered in 1701, 
exerted itself to send out chaplains and missionaries, 
but the name of the society represented a sentiment 
which was then only feebly nascent in England. 
The funds were small and the candidates few. 
Rather than send none, the society sent such as 
they could get; and what these were the complaints 
and remonstrances from the colonies too clearly 
indicate. "Many of them," observes Dr. Hawks, 
" were every way unfitted for their stations. The 
precariousness of the tenure by which they held 
their livings contributed not a little to beget in them 
an indifference to their duties, and the irregularities 
and crimes of an unworthy clergyman could not be 
visited effectually with the severities of ecclesiastical 
censure. Far removed from his diocesan, and stand- 
ing in little awe of the authorities of the Episcopal 
commissary, he sometimes offended religion and 
morals with impunity, and still remained in the 
Church, a reproach to her ministry." L 

1 Contributions to Ecclesiastical History, etc., pp. 88, 89. 

Mr. Whitefield wrote to the "Venerable Society," etc., under 
date of November 30, 1740 : " The state of the Church of Eng- 
land in America is at a very low ebb, and will in all probability be 
much worse — nay, at last dwindled into nothing — unless care be 
taken to send over missionaries that are better qualified for the 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 73 

"In numerous instances," observes the Rev. Dr. 
Babcock, " we have heard from the lips of old men 
lamentable descriptions of the immoral and prof- 
ligate lives of their former rectors. Two or three 
days in each week during the season the parson 
spent in fox-hunting with his irreligious parishion- 
ers, and the hunt closed with bacchanalian orgies 
in which he usually bore the leading part. We 
have seen a manuscript volume of poetry composed 
by one of these Virginia shepherds that for amatory 
levity would have raised a blush on the cheeks of 
Horace. 1 Many came over, such as wore black 
coats and could babble in a pulpit, roar in a tavern, 
exact from their parishioners, and by their dissolute 



pastoral office. It is too evident that most of them are corrupt in 
their principles and immoral in their practices, and many of them 
such as could not stand their trials amongst the Dissenters or were 
discarded by them for their profaneness and irregularities. Our 
Church seems to be their last refuge," etc. — Episcopal Historical 
Collection ', 185 I, p. 129. 

Colonel Heathcote takes a more cheerful view of the society's 
influence, so far, at least, as Connecticut was concerned. " I really 
believe," he observes, " that more than half the people in that gov- 
ernment think our Church to be little better than the Papist. Rut 
— I bless God for it — the society has robbed them of their best 
argument, which was the ill lives of our clergy that came into these 
parts, and the truth is I have not seen many good men but of the 
society's sending." — Doc. History of A~e7j York, iv. 122. 

But Mr. Whitefield calls even the society's missionaries " ungodly 
despicable ministers." 

1 See American Quarterly Register, 1841. 



74 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

lives destroy rather than feed their flocks." 1 A 
great writer, who in statements of fact is as true to 
history as in his portraitures of character he is true 
to nature, observes: "Unlike some of the neigh- 
boring provinces, Virginia was a Church of England 
colony. The clergymen were paid by the State and 
had glebes allotted to them; and there being no 
Church of England bishop yet in America, the 
colonists were obliged to import their divines from 
the mother country. Such as came were not natu- 
rally of the very best or most eloquent kind of pastors. 
Noblemen's hangers-on, insolvent parsons who had 
quarreled with justice or the bailiff, brought their 
stained cassocks into the colony in the hopes of find- 
ing a living." 2 The condition of things was equally 
bad in Maryland, where Mr. Bancroft says, " Ruffians, 
fugitives from justice, men stained by intemperance 
and lust, dishonored the surplices they wore." 3 

Presbyterians, even in those colonies or parts of 
colonies where they composed the great majority, 
were "dissenters," enjoying a precarious toleration. 
They could preach only by special license and in 
licensed meetinghouses. Nothing was more com- 
mon than for them to be called before justices or 

1 Dr. Hawks' Ecclesiastical History of Virginia, p. 65, quoted 
from a contemporaneous writer. 

' 2 The Virginians^ by W. M. Thackeray, chapter v. 
3 Bancroft's History, iv. 129. 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 75 

governors and threatened or fined for illegally 
preaching the gospel. Such was the treatment that 
Francis Makemie, George Hampton and John 
McNish met with in the early part of the century; 
and down to the Revolution the experiences of the 
Presbyterian clergy were often of the same sort. 
In 1618 a law was passed in Virginia which enacted 
that every person " should go to church on Sundays 
and holidays, or lye neck and heels that night and 
be a slave to the colony the following day." For 
the second offense he was to be a slave a week and 
the third a year. In 1642 a law was passed that 
" no minister should be permitted to officiate in the 
country but such as shall produce to the governor a 
testimonial that he hath received ordination from 
some bishop in England, and shall then subscribe 
to be conformable to the orders and constitutions of 
the Church of England; and if any other person pre- 
tending himself to be a minister shall, contrary to 
this act, presume to teach or preach publicly or 
privately, the governor and council are hereby de- 
sired and empowered to suspend and silence the 
person so offending, and upon his obstinate persist- 
ence to compel him to depart the country with the 
first convenience. Several of these laws were 
afterwards repealed or the penalties mitigated, but 
they remained severe until the Revolution." 1 

1 Dr. Miller's Life of Dr. John Rodgers, p. 28. 



76 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

It was quite in the natural order of things, there- 
fore, that when the struggle broke out between 
Great Britain and her colonies the Episcopal and the 
Presbyterian clergy should take different sides. 
The former were entirely satisfied with the existing 
order and had nothing to gain by a change. They 
were, of course, the friends of a government which 
favored them, which gave them peculiar privileges, 
among others the privilege of looking down on and 
harassing all other Christians as dissenters. Their 
own instincts all tended the same way. They were 
English born or had been educated and ordained in 
England. They owed ecclesiastical allegiance to 
the English episcopate, or at near hand to the resi- 
dent commissary of the bishop of London. The 
spiritual peers and the clergy " at home " all lent a 
zealous support to the measures of the Parliament 
for coercing the colonies. It was too much to ex- 
pect that the Episcopal clergy here should separate 
themselves from the body to which they belonged. 
They simply stuck to the principles of loyalty and 
allegiance that were natural to them in the circum- 
stances. 

The Rev. Dr. Inglis, rector of Trinity Church, 
New York, writing to the secretary of the "Ven- 
erable Society for the Propagation of the Gospel " 
in 1776, says, "1 have the pleasure to assure you 
that all the society's missionaries, without excepting 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 77 

one in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and so 
far as I can learn in all the New England colonies, 
have proved themselves loyal and faithful subjects 
in these trying times, and have to the utmost of 
their power opposed the spirit of disaffection. I 
must add that all the other clergy of our Church in 
the above-named colonies have observed the same 
line of conduct; and although their joint endeavors 
could not wholly prevent the rebellion, yet they 
checked it considerably for some time, and pre- 
vented many thousands from plunging into it." 

He adds that very few of the laity who had 
either property or character joined in the rebellion. 

This latter assertion had many and signal excep- 
tions, or rather outside of New York and Connecti- 
cut had very little basis of fact. But the Episcopal 
clergy, at least in the breaking out of the Revolu- 
tion, found themselves in broad and bitter antag- 
onism with the spirit and views of the people. 
They could not reconcile themselves to read the 
service leaving out the prayers for the king, nor 
could they read them without subjecting themselves 
to interruptions, threats and a possible experience 
of tar and feathers. They took the safe course of 
demitting their functions, and shook off the dust 
from their feet as a testimony against their rebellious 
parishioners. 

The Episcopal Church, therefore, which one hun- 



78 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

dred years ago numbered about two hundred and 
fifty clergy of all sorts (except bishops), suddenly 
and universally disappeared. The temples were 
left, but the priests had departed. After the melan- 
choly extinguishment of Mr. Duche, not one of 
them, with the exception of Dr. White, officiated as 
chaplain in Congress, and only Dr. Griffith and two 
or three more as chaplains in the army — a neglect 
with which it has been impossible to charge the 
Episcopal clergy in any period since. A few reso- 
lute parsons, like Mr. Beach in Connecticut and Dr. 
Inglis in New York, continued a while longer to 
pray for the king. Perhaps Dr. Inglis himself read 
the last collect for King George that was ever of- 
fered after the colonies developed into States. That 
distinguished and justly honored minister and 
(later) prelate, William White, states that he read 
the prayer for the king the last time on the Sunday 
preceding the 4th of July, 1776. 

So it resulted that the Established Church and the 
colonial officials were on one side, and the American 
People on the other; just as, a few years later, it 
came to pass in France that the nation found itself 
struggling for freedom against the noblesse and the 
clergy. 

Whatever may have been true in the history of 
earlier struggles between prerogative and liberty in 
England, it is quite unnecessary to claim that there 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 79 

is any natural relationship between Episcopacy and 
monarchy, or any vital repugnance between it and 
popular institutions. It is even maintained by dis- 
tinguished writers of that persuasion that there is a 
singularly close analogy between the constitution of 
their Church and the political Constitution of this 
country. Certainly no one will pretend that since 
the establishment of independence there have been 
any purer patriots or stauncher friends of liberty 
than the clergy and laity of the Episcopal Church. 
It is with no disposition, therefore, to cast reproach 
upon that large and intelligent Christian body, but 
simply because the truth of history requires it, that 
the fact is stated of the nearly universal as well as 
very bitter Toryism of the Episcopal clergy during 
the Revolutionary period. They continually wrote 
to England maligning the characters and ridiculing 
the efforts of the patriot leaders. They encouraged 
the ministry with assurances of certain and not dis- 
tant success ; l when the appeal was made " to arms 
and to the God of battles," they withdrew into ob- 
scurity, fled to Nova Scotia or returned to England. 
We have all, perhaps, seen a coarse engraving 
purporting to represent the offering of "the first 

] "I have not a doubt" (wrote Dr. Inglis in 1776) " but with 
the blessing of Providence His Majesty's arms will be successful 
and finally crush this unnatural rebellion." — Doc. Hist, of A T ew 
York, iii, 1064. 



80 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

prayer in Congress." The rotund and florid offi- 
ciating chaplain in the front, clad in surplice, is the 
Rev. Jacob Duche, described by one of his brethren 
at the time as a ' ; most amiable youth, of capti- 
vating eloquence." 

The implication of the picture would seem to be 
that it was the Episcopal Church in the person of 
this patriotic and captivating " churchman " which 
pronounced her benediction on the opening 
struggle. 1 

The Rev. Jacob Duche was by birth a Philadel- 
phian. His grandfather Anthony, a French refugee, 
had acquired property here, and on some occasion 
lent William Penn a little money. Thirty pounds 
of this remained unpaid. Penn offered Mr. Duche 
in satisfaction the entire square lying between 
Market and Arch and Third and Fourth streets, 
which he declined. 

Jacob grew up a promising boy, and was sent 
to England to perfect his education. He studied at 
the University of Cambridge, in due time received 
Episcopal ordination, returned home, and about 
1770 became rector of Christ's Church, Philadelphia. 

In the Congress of 1776, on the nomination of 

1 On the celebration in Carpenters' Hall, Philadelphia, of the 
centenary of the First Congress, the portrait of Mr. Duche occupied 
a conspicuous position over the head of the chairman — with how- 
little fitness the story here recited shows. 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 81 

Samuel Adams, he was elected chaplain. He had 
previously acted in that capacity for the Continental 
Congress the year before: and now, robed in full 
canonicals, he came forward to offer the first prayer 
after the Declaration of Independence. The singu- 
larly appropriate lesson for the morning was the 
thirty-fifth Psalm: " Plead thou my cause, O Lord, 
with them that strive with me, and fight thou with 
them that fight against me. Awake, and stand up 
to judge my quarrel ; avenge thou my cause, my 
God and my Lord." 

Having finished the lesson, the chaplain laid aside 
the prayer book, and stretching forth his arms 
broke out with great fervor of manner in the recita- 
tion of a highly-appropriate precomposed prayer: 
11 Look down in mercy, we beseech thee (he prayed), 
on these our American States, who have fled from 
the rod of the oppressor and thrown themselves on 
thy gracious protection. Give them wisdom in 
council and valor in the field ; defeat the malicious 
designs of our cruel adversaries. Oh, let the voice 
of thine unerring justice, sounding in their hearts, 
constrain them to drop the weapons of war from 
their unnerved hands in the day of battle." 

This glow of patriotic enthusiasm lasted for three 
months. Within that time New York was occupied 
and Philadelphia threatened by the British. Mr. 
Duche's faith, which apparently had in it little of 



82 CONDITION OF THE CHURCH 

the substance of things hoped for, began to waver. 
He resigned his chaplaincy and withdrew into tem- 
porary obscurity. The following year the disasters 
of the patriot arms increased. Lord Howe defeated 
the insurgents at the Brandywine and occupied 
Philadelphia. Then Mr. Duche once more came 
forth upon the scene. Providence was evidently 
frowning on the rebel cause; and far be it from Mr. 
Duche that he should be found fighting against 
God! He hastened to renounce his rebellion and 
"throw himself on the gracious protection" of 
Lord Howe. All this might easily have been for- 
gotten; but with a bold stroke for immortality, he 
had the sublime impudence to write to General 
Washington urging him to pursue a similar course. 
He alleges that the cause of the revolted colonies 
was as hopeless as it was godless, represents the 
army, both officers and men, as a vulgar and undis- 
ciplined rabble, and recommends Washington to 
disperse Congress at the point of the bayonet. 
Having thus given the highest possible evidence of 
recovered loyalty, Mr. Duche sailed for England. 
Washington laid the insulting letter before Congress 
and directed the bearer to inform Mr. Duche that if 
he had had any idea of its nature he should have re- 
turned it unopened. 

I feel no hesitation in making this commentary on 
the pictorial fraud referred to, since this frivolous 



AT THE OPENING OF THE REVOLUTION 83 

renegade will be dismissed with equal contempt by 
the Church he dishonored as by Christians of every 
other denomination. 



II 

THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH AND THE WAR OF 
INDEPENDENCE 

The course of the Presbyterian clergy, both dur- 
ing the war and throughout the whole series of 
events leading to it, is so broadly written on the 
pages of history that did it not seem to make a 
necessary part of a story like this I should content 
myself with barely alluding to it. It was exactly 
seventy years before, that their first presbytery had 
been organized in the city of Philadelphia, with 
only seven ministers. During this period of 
"Babylonian captivity," discouraged as they had 
continually been by the royal governors, fined and 
shut up in jail under pretext of their preaching 
without a license, their churches wrested from them, 
their congregations doubly taxed to sustain their 
own clergy and those of the Episcopal Church also, 
— they had yet multiplied to about one hundred 
ministers and twice that number of congregations. 
At the breaking out of the Revolutionary War they 



84 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

were distributed into eleven presbyteries. The 
presbyteries of New York, Dutchess and Suffolk, 
with about thirty ministers, were mostly in New 
York. New Brunswick, with nine ministers, in 
New Jersey. The First and Second Philadelphia 
and Lewes, with twenty members, in Pennsylvania. 
New Castle, with eight ministers, and Donegal, 
with thirteen, were in Delaware and Maryland, 
Hanover in Virginia, with perhaps twelve ministers, 
and Orange, with fifteen, in North Carolina. With 
absolute unanimity these pastors and their people 
committed themselves to the doubtful and desperate 
struggle for independence. Heterogeneous as they 
were in origin — part New England Congregational- 
ists, part Dutchmen of New Amsterdam, part 
Scotch-Irish, part Huguenots, part Highlanders, ex- 
iles of "the '45" — the common element of a Pres- 
byterian polity and a Calvinistic theology fused 
them into one patriotic mass, glowing with an in- 
tense passion for civil and religious liberty. They 
openly took the attitude, and consented to the name 
and the responsibility, of rebels against the British 
government. 

It was no doubt a zeal for religious, quite as 
much as for political liberty, that impelled them 
into this position — a sentiment that did not operate 
with equal force in New England, where the Con- 
gregationalists, instead of suffering as dissenters, 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 85 

were themselves an established Church, able and 
not wholly indisposed to lay a heavy hand on other 
denominations. 

Dr. Inglis says, " Although civil liberty was the 
ostensible object, the bait that was flung out to catch 
the populace at large and engage them in the rebel- 
lion, yet it is now past all doubt that an abolition of 
the Church of England was one of the principal 
ends aimed at, and hence the unanimity of the dis- 
senters in this business. I have it from good au- 
thority that the Presbyterian ministers, at a synod 
where most of them in the middle colonies were 
collected, passed a resolve to support the Conti- 
nental Congress in all their measures. This, and 
this only, can account for the uniformity of their 
conduct, for / do not know one of them, nor have I 
been able, after strict inquiry, to hear of any, who 
did not by preaching and every effort in their 
power promote all the measures of the Congress, 
however extravagant." l 

It was not, however, by any passionate impulse, 
or by any fraudulent representation of their leaders, 
that they were brought into an attitude so much at 
variance with all their principles as Christians and 
all their instincts as subjects. The spirit of the 
Presbyterian Church, like that of the Episcopal, 

1 State of the Anglo- Anierican Church in 1 776, by the Rev. 
Charles Inglis, Doc. Hist, of New York, iv, 1048. 



86 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

though perhaps in a somewhat less intense degree, 
is conservative. Comprehending in its clergy a body 
of educated as well as profoundly religious men, 
and in its membership mostly the upper and middle 
classes, containing few poor and none ignorant, 
with a large stake, therefore, in the stability of 
society, — the Presbyterian Church is necessarily 
pledged to order, loyalty and the maintenance of 
existing institutions. Presbyterianism has always 
been in quick sympathy with constitutional govern- 
ment, but is by no necessity hostile to monarchy. 
If at one time, while fighting the battle of English 
liberties, it was found in deadly and fatal collision 
with the sovereign, it was also found, in its recoil 
from anarchy, forward in rebuilding the throne. It 
was the English Presbyterians who joined with the 
army to bring about the Restoration; and they are 
not otherwise to be blamed for the consequences 
than as men may be blamed who fly from petty 
tyrants to the throne, and in their zeal for order are 
too little on their gua/d against treachery. They 
bound the king, so far as oaths could bind so "uni- 
versal a villain," to the cause of religion and right- 
eousness. They were, of course, betrayed; but it 
has taken several generations since to bring the 
world to a complete realization of the bottomless 
folly and faithlessness of the house of Stuart. 
The Presbyterians of the American colonies were 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 87 

imbued with a spirit of intense loyalty to the British 
government. In no part of the empire was there a 
more enthusiastic reverence for the throne. The 
provincials gloried in the title and claimed the 
rights of British subjects. They detested the brutal 
radicalism of John Wilkes and the English mob. In 
the admirable pastoral letter addressed to the 
churches by the synod of New York and Philadel- 
phia on the breaking out of hostilities they say: 
"In carrying on this important struggle let every 
opportunity be taken to express your attachment 
and respect to our sovereign King George and to 
the revolution principles by which his august family 
was seated on the British throne. We recommend, 
indeed, not only allegiance to him from duty and 
principle, as the first magistrate of the empire, but 
esteem and reverence for the person of the prince 
who has merited well of his subjects on many ac- 
counts, and who has probably been misled into the 
late and the present measures by those about him. 
It gives us the greatest pleasure to say, from our 
own certain knowledge of all belonging to our 
communion, that the present opposition to the 
measures of the ministry does not in the least arise 
from disaffection to the king or a desire of separa- 
tion from the parent state. We are happy in being 
able with truth to affirm, that no part of America 
would either have approved or permitted such in- 



88 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

suits as have been offered to the sovereign in Great 
Britain. We expect you, therefore, to continue in 
the same disposition and not to suffer oppression or 
injury itself to provoke you into anything which 
may seem to betray contrary sentiments. Let it 
ever appear that you only desire the preservation 
and security of those rights which belong to you as 
freemen and Britons, and that reconciliation upon 
these terms is your most ardent desire." l 

This was in May, 1775, a month after the 
slaughter at Lexington and the disastrous retreat 
of the British troops upon Boston. 

This sentiment of affection for the person of the 
sovereign was with great difficulty rooted out from 
the hearts of the colonists. They wept with at 
least conventional tears the death of George II and 
hailed with enthusiastic hopes the accession of his 
grandson to the throne. 

That brilliant and too brief light of the American 
pulpit— the Doctor Seraphicus of the colonial min- 
istry — Samuel Davies, in his sermon on the death 
of that profligate Hanoverian prince. George II, 
broke out into such strains as these: — 

"George is no more! George the mighty, the 
just, the gentle, the wise, George the father of 
Britain and her colonies, the guardian of laws and 
liberty, the protector of the oppressed, the arbiter 

1 See Minutes of the Synod, p. 46S. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 89 

of Europe, the terror of tyrants and of France! 
George, the friend of man, the benefactor of mil- 
lions, is no more. Britain expresses her sorrow in 
national groans. Europe reechoes to the melancholy 
sound. This remote American continent shares 
in the loyal sympathy. The wide intermediate At- 
lantic rolls the tide of grief to these distant shores." 
And after pages more in this maestoso vein the strain 
changes to a joyful allegro as Mr. Davies turns to 
hail the newly-risen star of British monarchy. 
" But I retract the melancholy thought (he says). 
George still lives, he still adorns his throne, he still 
blesses the world in the person of his royal de- 
scendant and successor; and if the early appearance 
of genius, humanity, condescension, the spirit of 
liberty and love of his people, if British birth, edu- 
cation and connections, if the wishes and prayers 
of every lover of his country, have any efficacy, 
George the Third will reign like George the Second. 
Hail, desponding religion! lift up thy drooping 
head and triumph. Virtue, thou heaven-born exile, 
return to court! Young George invites thee. 
George declares himself thy early friend and patron. 
Vice, thou triumphant monster, with all thy in- 
fernal train, retire, abscond and fly to thy native 
hell! Young George forbids thee to appear at 
court, in the army, the navy or any of thy usual 
haunts. What happy days are before us when Re- 



90 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

ligion and George shall reign! " And then, soaring 
on the wings of Virgil's prophetic muse and con- 
templating the coming Saturnia regna, he ex- 
claimed, "Such a presage renders the blessings we 
shall receive under the reign of George the Third 
almost as sure as those we have received under that 
of George the Second." This (may I reverently 
add) he spoke not of himself, but being a prophet 
he foresaw obscurely the benefits which the pa- 
triotic and conscientious stubbornness of the 
sovereign would be the means of conferring on the 
colonists; for surely, if the prophetic charisma has 
ever lighted on any of the sons of men since the 
days of the apostles, it was upon him who, twenty 
years before Braddock's only surviving aid was 
called to the command of the American armies, 
spoke of "that heroic youth, Colonel Washington, 
whom Providence seems to have preserved in so 
signal a manner for some important service to his 
country." 1 

Let us think kindly of that narrow-minded, ob- 
stinate, devout, exemplary man and king whom 
our fathers were reluctantly forced to defy and dis- 
own. His reign signalized the era of decency in 
the British court which has broadened into the 

1 Religion and Patriotism the Constituents of a good Soldier, a 
sermon preached to Captain Overton's independent company of 
volunteers, raised in Hanover County, Virginia, August 17, 1755. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 91 

high-toned morality of the present reign. "The 
improvement in public morals at the close of the 
eighteenth century," observes Lord Campbell, "may 
mainly be ascribed to George the Third and his 
queen, who not only by their bright example but 
by their well-directed efforts greatly discouraged 
the profligacy which was introduced at the Restor- 
ation, and which continued with little abatement 
till their time." 1 

"O brothers speaking the same dear mother- 
tongue," said that beautiful genius who recited here 
in our own ears with such unshrinking fidelity the 
story of the "Four Georges," "O comrades, ene- 
mies no more, let us clasp a mournful hand as we 
stand by this royal corpse and call a truce to battle. 
Low he lies to whom the proudest used once to 
kneel, and who was cast lower than the poorest. 
Dead — whom millions prayed for in vain! Driven 
off his throne, buffeted by rude hands, his children 
in revolt, the darling of his age, his Cordelia, killed 
untimely before him. Hush, strife and quarrel, over 
the solemn grave! Sound, trumpets, a mournful 
march! Fall, dark curtain, upon his pageant, his 
pride, his grief, his awful tragedy!" 

Even down to the Declaration of Independence, 
through all the agitations, alarms and bloodshedding 

Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, vii, 182, American 
edition. 



92 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

of the opening scenes of the great drama, and while 
engaged in deadly opposition to the British Parlia- 
ment, the Presbyterian clergy continued to pray for 
the king and royal family. The explanation of this 
seeming anomaly is found in the very diverse views 
of constitutional allegiance entertained by the 
Americans toward the two parts of the British 
government. Not merely did they labor under the 
somewhat mistaken impression that George the 
Third was kindly disposed toward them, and was 
dragged reluctantly by popular enthusiasm into 
sanctioning the abitrary measures against their 
liberties, but they also made a wide difference be- 
tween the claims which the king and the Parliament 
had on their allegiance. The colonists had always 
insisted on the right of regulating their own affairs 
for themselves, of voting their own taxes, salarying 
their own judges, raising and officering their own 
troops. The colonial legislatures were in their view 
coordinate Parliaments. They uniformly denied 
that the imperial Parliament had any right to make 
laws for them while they were unrepresented in it. 
As against the British people, therefore, they had no 
declaration of independence to make. It was as 
absurd, they held, for the burgesses and knights of 
the English shires to vote .taxes on the colonists as 
it would be for the colonists to reverse the process. 
The people of England were not their masters. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 93 

They were self-governing by their own charters 
under the British constitution. The single point of 
union between them and the English people was 
allegiance in common to the same sovereign. 

The great and difficult step to be taken, therefore, 
by the colonists, in 1776, was to cast off their alle- 
giance to the throne. It was against the king that 
the impeachments of the Declaration were ad- 
dressed, and not against the Parliament. It was 
the long series of acts, so impressively recited in the 
preamble of that great instrument as implying every 
attribute that can define a tyrant, which forced the 
long-hesitating and reluctant provincials at length to 
sever the last tie which bound them to the British 
government. 

It was with no insincerity, therefore, that the 
Presbyterian clergy, for more than a year after we 
were actually at war with Great Britain, continued 
to pray for "our sovereign and rightful lord, King 
George." They owned him as their legitimate 
prince, though they denied that the Parliament was 
their master. No doubt, also, the simple, domestic 
and religious character of the king and the various 
stories told of his kindly, frugal life had greatly en- 
deared him to the colonists, with whom such virtues 
were prized at their full value. The last sound of 
prayer for George the Third died out of Presbyterian 
pulpits in the month of June, 1776, and in its stead 



94 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

came a new collect, sine monitore, quia de pectore, 
for "the Congress of these United States and for 
His Excellency the commander in chief of the 
American armies." 

It was just at this time that there swam into the 
ken of a distinguished British watcher of the skies a 
new planet, which, with perhaps a pardonable loy- 
alty, he called the Georgium Sidus. Astronomy 
herself, who seldom stoops to flatter kings, has 
since called it after the name of the finder, 
"Herschel," or, more commonly, Uranus. The 
tidings of the discovery came to us through the 
French savans; and the data were so complete that 
our own Rittenhouse— himself, I may add, a devout 
Presbyterian— was able at the first sweep to fix 
his glass upon that outlying member of our solar 
system. 

We have quite recently been informed, also from 
France, of the discovery of another planet of a cer- 
tain magnitude, with so many hours and minutes 
right ascension, so much south declination, and 
some three degrees, perhaps, of daily motion 
north. 1 The Georgium Sidus, though certainly a 
star of the first political magnitude, had unfortu- 
nately so little right ascension in this continent and 
so many degrees of northern motion that it soon set 

1 Communicated by Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Institu- 
tion to the New York Tribune in May, 1876. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 95 

in clouds beyond the lakes, and was never able af- 
terwards to send its rays south of the St. Lawrence. 

That increased fervor and importunity was given 
to the prayers which now went up for all those in 
authority might reasonably be presumed, and is il- 
lustrated by well-known facts. There had been 
for some time maintained in the city of New York 
by the Presbyterian and other clergy a weekly min- 
isters' meeting for devotion and mutual improve- 
ment. Eminent among this band of Christ's serv- 
ants was Dr. John Rodgers, previously of St. 
George's parish, Delaware, subsequently the first 
moderator of the General Assembly. He was an 
eloquent preacher, a firm and unwavering patriot, 
the friend and counselor of George Washington. 
No sooner had the clock struck the fated hour of 
liberty than on his motion the meeting was resolved 
into a concert of prayer for God's blessing upon the 
Revolutionary struggle, and was regularly attended 
as such until the British troops took possession of 
the city. The same sentiment pervaded our entire 
Church. From every Presbyterian pulpit in the 
land, from every Presbyterian hearth, went up the 
unceasing voice of intercession for the suffering 
country. 

But the Presbyterian clergy of the period by no 
means confined themselves to the duty of prayer for 
the cause of freedom. In the fluctuations of the 



96 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

war our own churches, like others, were frequently 
laid waste. They were burned by accident or de- 
sign. They were occupied by the British troops for 
riding schools, hospitals, jails or barracks. The 
congregations were dispersed or consisted only of 
non-combatants. The young, the middle-aged, in 
many cases the hale old men, were following after 
Washington, in those brave marches amid the sands 
of New Jersey, over the rocks and snows of Penn- 
sylvania, till they stood at length — all that was left 
of them — in the trenches about Yorktown. The 
displaced pastors in many cases went with their 
people to the field. They served as army chaplains. 
They shouldered the musket or bore the spontoon 
in the actual shock of battle. Of more than one of 
them it may be said, as of Ulric Zwingle, Pro 
Christo ei pro patria etiam cum fratribus, fortiter 
pugnans, immortalitis certus, occidit. 

The records of the synod mention the death of 
the Rev. James Caldwell, whose sufferings and death 
make one of the darker scenes in the drama of the 
Revolution, and of the Rev. John Rosburgh, of 
Allentown, New Jersey, who "was barbarously 
murdered by the enemy at Trenton on the 2d of 
January, 1777/' ' 

1 Minutes of the Synod of New York and Philadelphia under 
May 21, 1777. This cruel act was not committed by the Hessians, 
as commonly stated, but by a party of British dragoons, 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 9? 

It was by such experiences as these for our 
Church and our country that we came per ardua ad 
astra — through the stripes to the stars. 

The elders of our Church were equally forward 
in the cause of freedom — so much so, indeed, that 
if we should judge from numerous facts we might 
almost conclude that our entire eldership during 
that period was divided into teaching elders and 
fighting elders. A highly significant illustration of 
this is the fact that the five officers who commanded 
regiments or parts of regiments at the severe fight 
of King's Mountain, Colonels Williams, Shelby, 
Campbell, Sevier and Cleveland, were every one 
elders of Presbyterian churches. l 

The part played in the course of this struggle by 
Dr. John Witherspoon has been so much the theme 
of remark throughout these Centennial services that 
it is something more than superfluous to go into 
any detailed account of him. Yet a sketch of this 
kind would be too defective if he were wholly left 
out. He came to America in 1768, an adult and 
thoroughbred Scotchman, in consequence of his 
election to the presidency of the College of New 
Jersey. He had already been distinguished as a 
vigorous polemic, a keen satirist, a staunch though 
not always prudent defender of evangelical religion 
and Christian morality. His Ecclesiastical Charac- 

1 Smyth's E cries. Republicanism^. 145. 



98 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

teristics, dealing as it does in sarcasm, irony and 
personal caricature, is among the more doubtful 
methods by which a good cause may be defended. 
It was an anonymous exposure of the theological 
system and moral and religious character of the 
low and slow " moderates" of the Church of Scot- 
land. 

The work fell like a bombshell into the camp of 
the philosophizing, theater-going, semi-deistical 
clergy, the friends of Hume, Lord Karnes and 
Robert Burns. An outbreak of wrath followed. 
Dr. Witherspoon was a member of the Presbytery 
of Irvine, and had just been " presented " to the 
living of Paisley. The Presbytery of Paisley took 
up the book, pronounced it false and libelous, 
and lodged a complaint of it and its reputed author 
before the Synod of Glasgow. Dr. Witherspoon 
defended himself in a firm and ingenious speech, 
challenging the proof of his authorship of the offen- 
sive publication and charging the Presbytery of 
Paisley with a gratuitous and unauthorized attempt 
to destroy him indirectly, instead of coming man- 
fully forward and tabling charges against him. 

The result was his acquittal and triumph. But he 
fared less successfully in a subsequent collision 
with the civil courts. He was indicted for attack- 
ing certain persons by name from the pulpit, found 
guilty of libel and sentenced to the payment of a 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 99 

considerable fine. In his defense before the Synod 
of Glasgow, Dr. Witherspoon had observed that if 
he had spoken of the Scottish Kirk with half the 
severity that many English writers had employed 
toward their own clergy "he should need to keep 
a ship always ready to flee to another country." 
The ship arrived now just at the critical moment, 
bringing to Dr. Witherspoon an invitation to accept 
the presidency of the College of New Jersey. He 
embarked and sailed away, leaving his sureties 
to settle as they could with the justices of the 
quorum. ] 

The Ecclesiastical Characteristics made an im- 
pression by its severity and personality much beyond 
what can be explained to the modern reader by its 
literary merits. The irony is too broad and coarse, 
and leaves the reader too little opportunity for the 
exercise of his own penetration in discovering the 
application. Another essay of the author's, an 
allegorical history of the Christian Church, and par- 
ticularly of the Church of Scotland, under the figure 
of a "corporation of servants," is both far wittier 
than the Characteristics and much freer from objec- 
tionable personalities. 

In all Dr. Witherspoon's miscellaneous writings 
the influence of his familiarity with the writings of 

1 Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit, article John 

Witherspoon. 

L.ofC. 



100 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

Dean Swift is very observable. The treatise last 
named is evidently modeled on the History of John 
Bully and while wanting in the grotesque humor of 
Swift's dialogue carries out the allegory with almost 
as grave and consistent an irony. With far less 
genius than the dean of St. Patrick's, he had the 
same literary audacity, the same plain, nervous 
English style, the same passion for dabbling in 
politics, and perhaps a little too much of the same 
willingness to indulge in coarse jests and allusions. 

John Witherspoon was as true a type of the 
average Scotch Presbyterian mind as John Knox 
himself, from whom he is said to have descended. 
Hard, resolute, pugnacious, his mission was to 
fight the battles of religious liberty under what 
standard soever; and it may be regarded as probable 
enough that had he come to America at an earlier 
age he would have been as ready to draw the 
sword as to wield the pen in the cause of independ- 
ence. While quite a youth his tastes led him to 
look on at the field of Falkirk, where the High- 
landers of Charles Edward routed the royal army, 
and where, though a non-combatant, he remained 
a prisoner in the hands of the rebels. The bright 
blossoming of his piety and culture was guarded by 
the spines of a high temper and a formidable logic. 
He bore on his very front the legend of his country's 
thistle, Nemo me impitne lacessit. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 101 

Such a man, though but a recent immigrant, was 
as valuable as he was a ready champion of the 
rights of the colonies. His sentiments rapidly grew 
up to the height of those of the most advanced 
patriots. In his letter "On conducting the Ameri- 
can Controversy " and his " Thoughts on American 
Liberty," while continuing to profess affection and 
loyalty to the British throne, he exposed with great 
clearness the actual situation of affairs and sketched 
with the hand of a statesman the steps the colonies 
should pursue for the vindication of their rights. 
In the pulpit he was equally outspoken. On the 
17th of May, 1776, appointed by Congress as a day 
of fasting and prayer, he preached a sermon (after- 
wards published with a dedication to John Han- 
cock) on the text, "Surely the wrath of man shall 
praise thee: the remainder of wrath shalt thou 
restrain." The theme was "God's dominion over 
the passions of men," and was drawn out into the 
proposition that "the ambition of mistaken princes, 
the cunning and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt 
ministers, and even the inhumanity of brutal 
soldiers, shall finally promote the glory of God; 
and in the meantime, while the storm continues, 
his mercy and kindness shall appear in prescribing 
bounds to their rage and fury." 

In the course of this sermon Dr. Witherspoon 
said: "You shall not, my brethren, hear from me 



]()2 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

in the pulpit what you have never heard from me in 
conversation: I mean railing at the king personally, 
or even his ministers and Parliament and the people 
of Britain as so many barbarous savages. Many of 
their actions have been worse than their intentions. 
That they should desire unlimited dominion if they 
can obtain or preserve it is neither new nor wonder- 
ful. I do not refuse submission to their unjust 
claims because they themselves are corrupt or 
profligate, though many of them probably are so, 
but because they are men, and therefore liable to all 
the selfish bias inseparable from human nature. I 
call this claim unjust of making laws to bind us in 
all cases whatsoever, because they are widely 
separated from us, are independent of us and have 
an interest in oppressing us. This is the true and 
proper hinge of the controversy between Great 
Britain and the colonies." 

A few days after this sermon was preached Dr. 
Witherspoon became a member of the provincial 
Congress of New Jersey, and on the 2id of June 
was chosen one of the representatives to the general 
Congress. Only four days elapsed between his 
taking his seat in this august body and the 2d of 
July, when the declaration was adopted. He had 
not heard the debates; and though his own mind 
was irrevocably made up and he came, indeed, under 
instructions to vote for independence, yet to satisfy 



AND THE WAR OF IS DEPENDENCE 103 

his own sense of self-respect he desired to hear the 
whole argument in the affirmative presented. To 
satisfy him and one or two others similarly situated 
this was agreed to; and, by the choice of his col- 
leagues, Samuel Adams came forward and went 
over the whole ground. 

Witherspoon no longer pretended any hesitation. 
He had not been willing to vote on so momentous a 
question without both hearing and giving reasons. 
He declared himself fully satisfied, and urged that 
the declaration should be passed without delay. 
He thought the country was ripe for it, and more 
than ripe: it was in danger of spoiling for the want 
of it. Besides this single dictum and the fragment 
of a speech traditionally imputed to him, we have 
no means of knowing what particular services he 
rendered the country on the floor of Congress; but 
his published " speeches " are a monument of his 
enthusiasm in the cause of liberty. In successive 
pamphlets he laid open before the world the causes 
and character of the war, warned the British people 
of the consequence of persisting in it, and in the 
name of his adopted countrymen avowed that they 
infinitely preferred extermination to the surrender 
of their liberties. From this high flame of heroic 
argument he could descend to pillory a renegade 
parson or lampoon a tory printer. James Riving- 
ton, besides his other claims to notoriety, had "the 



104 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

fame to be lashed by his pen." In the cause of 
independence he fought with "what trivial weapon 
came to hand." Libertati (for liberty, he thought, 
as well as for necessity) quodlibet telum utile. For 
some enemies of freedom he scorned a sword. It 
was honor enough if he mauled them with a 
bludgeon or even defiled their faces with dirt. His 
sun both rose and set partly in clouds; but its 
middle course at least was resplendent with the 
light of heroism as a patriot, zeal and success as an 
educator of youth and faithful testimony as a 
preacher of the gospel. 

The formal histories of our Church relate how 
many others of our clergy helped on the struggle 
for independence by brave words and brave deeds, 
by valiant service in the field or wise counsel in the 
senate. The whole weight of the only body of 
clergy and churches which, out of New England, 
enjoyed any appreciable prestige or influence, went 
undivided in aid of the cause of liberty. The schism 
in the Presbyterian body had been happily healed 
seventeen years before. The Church was absolutely 
harmonious and at peace within herself, and acted 
as a unit in the struggle. There were a few in- 
stances, like the famous and witty Mather Byles. of 
Congregationalist tories, not one of a Presbyterian. 
The social status, the education and culture, the 
eloquence, the faith, the prayers of our Church 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 105 

fathers were enlisted on the side of independence; 
so that, as that staunch friend of the colonies, 
Horace Walpole, said: " There was no good in cry- 
ing about the matter. Cousin America had run 
off with a Presbyterian parson, and that was the 
end of it." ' 

It is a circumstance of interest connected with 
this history that our struggle with Great Britain had 
nothing whatever of the character of a religious 
war. When, twenty years earlier, the provincials 
fought by the side of the British regulars for the 
mastery of the continent, it was against aliens and 
papists, with a legitimate horror of wooden shoes, 
frogs and the whore of Babylon. ''Virginians, 
Britons, Christians, Protestants! " exclaimed Samuel 
Davies in 1756, " if you would save yourselves and 
your families from all the infernal horrors of po- 
pery, if you would preserve your estates from fall- 
ing a prey to priests, friars and hungry Gallic slaves, 

1 Letter to the Countess of Ossory, August 3, 1775. 

He was never tired of launching his indignant witticisms at the 
parliament and the conduct of the war. " The Americans, at least, 
have acted like men. Our conduct has been that of pert children : 
we have thrown a pebble at a mastiff, and are surprised it was not 
frightened." — December 15, 1774. " A great majority in both 
houses is as brave as a mob ducking a pickpocket. They flattered 
themselves they should terrify the colonies into submission in three 
months, and are amazed to hear there is no such probability. They 
might as well have excommunicated them and left the devil to put 
the sentence in execution." — February 18, 1775. 



106 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

if you would preserve the pure religion of Jesus 
from superstition, idolatry and tyranny over the 
conscience, strike home in such a cause! " 

But here we were arrayed against our brethren of 
the same Anglo-Saxon race, speaking the same 
''dear English tongue," and professing the same 
evangelical faith of the Reformation. Even those 
unfortunate Hessians, who were sold by the greed 
of their prince to kill and be killed in battles in 
the result of which they had no interest, were our 
fellow-Protestants and, I may say with a little 
allowance, our fellow-Presbyterians, formidable to 
our grandmothers by their outlandish speech and 
their bearskin caps much more than to our grand- 
sires by any forward or ferocious valor in the field. 
They were the subjects of Frederic II of Hesse- 
Cassel, himself a pervert to Romanism, while the 
great majority of his people were of the Reformed 
or the Lutheran confessions. It is pathetic to be 
told that when nine hundred of these poor " driven 
cattle" laid down their arms at Trenton, and were 
formed into columns to be marched off to their 
prisoners' quarters, they lifted up their sad voices 
in the old familiar strains of a Vaterland's hymn, 
"Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott" or some other. 
Their own " wehr und waffen " had proved, indeed, 
but a poor reliance in their ignorant struggle against 
liberty. But God was their refuge and their 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 107 

strength, a very present help in trouble. The war 
was neither carried on, therefore, with that ferocity 
which characterizes religious wars, nor did it leave 
legacies of unsatisfied vengeance behind. Many of 
the Hessians remained as voluntary settlers when 
the royal armies finally withdrew, and became a 
valuable element in the composition of American 
society. 

If we examine the records of the Synod of New 
York and Philadelphia during the war, we find 
frequent evidence of the intense interest with 
which the struggle was viewed and the hearty 
patriotism of the Presbyterian clergy. In the 
pastoral letter already referred to, issued to the 
churches the 22d of May, 1774, the synod urges: 
"Be careful to maintain the union that at present 
subsists through all the colonies. In particular, 
as the Continental Congress now sitting in Phila- 
delphia consists of delegates chosen in the most 
free and unbiased manner by the body of the 
people, let them not only be treated with respect 
and encouraged in their difficult service, not only 
let your prayers be offered up to God for his di- 
rection in their proceedings, but adhere firmly to 
their resolutions, and let it be seen that they are 
able to bring out the whole strength of this vast 
country to carry them into execution." 



108 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

Repeatedly the synod appointed days of fasting 
and humiliation in view of those sins which had 
brought down the "just judgment" of God in so 
destructive a war upon the colonists; and they made 
the last Thursday of each month "a monthly con- 
cert of prayer" for its early and successful termina- 
tion. They felt no difficulty, as devout students of 
God's word and providence, in reconciling the un- 
just and wicked character of the war on the part of 
Great Britain with its righteousness as a part of the 
divine administration toward an ill-deserving gen- 
eration. As subjects, indeed, they were the victims 
of oppression and misgovernment; but as sinners, 
they laid their hand upon their mouth and acknowl- 
edged that they received no more than the colonial 
iniquity deserved. 

In 1779 the synod, " taking into consideration the 
great and increasing decay of vital piety, the degen- 
eracy of manners, want of public spirit, and prev- 
alence of vice and immorality that obtains through- 
out our land, and that the righteous God, by con- 
tinuing still to afflict us with the sore calamity of a 
cruel and barbarous war, is loudly calling the inhabit- 
ants to repentance and reformation, and as a means 
thereto to deep humiliation and frequent and fer- 
vent prayer," appointed the 17th of August to be 
observed for that purpose, and renewed the recom- 
mendation for the patriotic monthly concert. 



AND THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 109 

Identically the same action, in the same words, 
seems to have been taken by the synod the year 
following, and the same month and day fixed upon 
for public humiliation and prayer. In 1777 the 
Continental Congress having appointed a general 
fast to be kept on the 17th of May, the moderator, 
by his own authority, postponed the meeting of 
synod till after that day; which was allowed to pass 
pro hac vice under protest. Louis XVI, whose 
throne was already beginning to totter, had become 
our ally; and on the 17th of May, 1782, the synod 
appointed a committee, of which Dr. John Wither- 
spoon was chairman, to prepare an address to the 
French minister, congratulating him on the birth of 
a Dauphin, "son and heir to the crown of his royal 
master; " that unhappy " Bourbon " who died in the 
prison of the temple, but whom it is still be- 
lieved by some we had "among us" disguised 
under the alias of Eleazar Williams, and in the 
shape of an Episcopal missionary to the St. Regis 
Indians. 



Ill 

STRUGGLE FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 

The Presbyterian Church came out of the war 
whose success she had done so much to ensure, de- 
pleted indeed in her churches, many of which had 



110 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

been destroyed, and in her membership, which had 
left large contingents on every battle field of the war, 
but with her organization intact, her machinery all 
in working order, and with a vigorous salient life 
that fitted her for an immediate career of growth 
and influence. That she stood far in advance of 
any other denomination in the land cannot be 
doubted. During all the preceding eight years of 
distraction and suffering, her ministry had steadily in- 
creased. The work of home evangelization had been 
systematically prosecuted. Pastors were detailed 
by order of the synod to supply occasional services 
to vacant congregations. Books of ' ' practical relig- 
ion " were purchased " for distribution among the 
frontier inhabitants;" missionaries were dispatched 
to plant and nurse churches in the feebler colonies; 
chaplains were commissioned for the army; frequent 
cases of licensure and installation occurred; the 
work of discipline was faithfully attended to. The 
Indian fund, the widows' fund, the fund "for the 
education of poor and pious young men for the 
ministry, "—all these were carefully administered. 
In every month of May during the war the synod 
held its regular "sederunt"; though the disturbed 
state of the country often prevented whole presby- 
teries from attending. Day after day during the 
sessions the quaint record informs us that "the 
synod met according to adjournment, ubi post prcccs 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 111 

sederunt qui supra; " an expansion of the cabalistic 
letters U. P. P. S. Q. S. found in the earlier min- 
utes. 

Particularly deserving of mention is the wise and 
firm policy of the synod in respect to the qualifica- 
tions of candidates for the ministry. The urgent 
need of ministers in various parts of the country led 
to the natural suggestion, so often renewed in later 
times, that young men of suitable gifts and piety 
might be introduced to the ministry after only brief 
intellectual discipline. Such an overture was made to 
the synod in 1776 by the Presbytery of New Castle. 
The synod replied that ''the superior advantages 
attending an education in public seminaries render 
it highly expedient to encourage the young men to 
finish their academical studies in such institutions, as 
means of securing a learned ministry; and presby- 
teries are ordered to promote this end by warmly 
recommending it to those who have the ministry in 
view. Yet as presbyteries are the proper judges to 
determine concerning the literary and other requisite 
qualifications for the ministerial office, it is not in- 
tended to preclude from admission to trial those 
who have not had the opportunity of obtaining 
public testimonials or degrees from public semi- 
naries." 

To the same effect was a brief and positive de- 
liverance of the synod in 1785. " An overture hav- 



112 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

ing been brought in in the following terms, viz., 
1 Whether, in the present state of the Church in 
America and the scarcity of ministers to fill our nu- 
merous congregations, the synod or presbyteries 
ought therefore to relax in any degree in the liter- 
ary qualifications required of intrants into the min- 
istry/ it was carried in the negative by a great 
majority." 

This was in noble harmony with the doctrine of 
the Kirk of Scotland as set forth in the first Book of 
Discipline. i( Neither for rarity of men, necessity 
of teaching, nor for any corruption of time, should 
unable persons be admitted to the ministry. Better 
it is to have the room vacant than to have unquali- 
fied persons, to the scandal of the ministry and 
hurt of the Kirk. In the rarity of qualified men 
we should call unto the Lord, that he of his good- 
ness would send forth true laborers to his harvest." 

The Presbyterian Church in America thus main- 
tained her hereditary character for a thoroughly 
trained and cultured ministry. Her clergy at the 
close of the war were few in number, not exceed- 
ing probably one hundred and fifty; but they were 
men who had borne the test of fire ; the peers for 
talent and accomplishment of the foremost in the 
State. They wore the prestige of a suffering and 
triumphant martyr-Church, fully identified with the 
spirit of the country. If any sect of Christians 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 113 

in the newly-founded republic could reasonably have 
claimed special favors from the State it was the 
Church of Rodgers and Caldwell, of Davies and 
Witherspoon, of Stanhope, of the Alisons and Blair 
Smiths, and the others whose conspicuous zeal had 
given the war the popular character of a " Presby- 
terian rebellion"; men whose lives had proclaimed 
before England and the world, 

" We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 

That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold." ' 

It is not strange that other sects, conscious of this 
fact, looked upon her with some jealousy and alarm. 
Not the slightest effort did our fathers make to avail 
themselves of these advantages. They desired 
nothing but equal rights for all and with all Chris- 
tians. In 1 78 1 and again in 1783 they adopted this 
declaration: "It having been represented to synod 
that the Presbyterian Church suffers in the opinion 
of other denominations from an apprehension that 
they hold intolerant principles, the synod do sol- 
emnly and publicly declare that they ever have 
and still do renounce and abhor the principles of in- 
tolerance, and we do believe that all peaceable 
members of civil society ought to be protected 
in the full and free exercise of their religion." 

1 Wordsworth, sonnets dedicated lo Liberty, I, xv, 



114 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

These just as well as generous sentiments were 
by no means universally entertained at that time. 
No sooner did the sun of peace illumine the land 
than Episcopacy, which had wholly disappeared 
from view, came forth again and with a singular 
lack both of modesty and justice endeavored to re- 
claim its lapsed colonial prerogatives. Our Church 
fathers were obliged to engage in a new struggle 
for religious equality. 

This struggle took place chiefly on the soil of 
Virginia, in which, as already observed, Episcopacy 
had been most thoroughly established. On the 5th 
December, 1776, after a debate lasting for two 
months, in which Thomas Jefferson and other 
great men of the Old Dominion took part, the 
assembly of the State, against the remonstrances of 
the Episcopalians and Methodists, repealed all laws 
either requiring attendance on Episcopal services or 
levying taxes for the support of Episcopal worship; 
but all churches, chapels, parsonages, glebe lands, 
etc., originally the property of a people full two- 
thirds of whom belonged to other denominations, 
were still left to the Episcopal Church. This was 
only an imperfect disestablishment, and the ad- 
herents of that Church by no means relinquished 
the hope of regaining the exclusive privileges they 
had lost. 

Strong demonstrations were made toward sup- 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 115 

pressing " unlicensed preachers," punishing the ir- 
regularities of "sectarian" worship, and confirm- 
ing the Episcopal Church in the unequal privileges 
it still retained. 

That great patriot and broad Christian, Patrick 
Henry, brought forward in the Virginia legislature 
a bill for the incorporation of all Christian societies 
and the support of public worship by general tax. 
The splendid eloquence and immense popularity of 
the author gave dangerous advantages to the meas- 
ure, and he urged it for two or more sessions with 
characteristic vehemence. The resistance to this 
bill — a bill which embodied in fact or in clear 
prospective all the evils of a union of Church and 
State — was led by the Presbytery of Hanover in 
Virginia, and it here becomes proper to give a brief 
history of the origin of that presbytery. 

Previous to the year 1740 there was but a single 
Presbyterian Church, so far as is known, in Eastern 
Virginia. The few who were not Episcopalians 
were Baptists or Quakers. In that year there was 
living in Hanover County (a district made famous as 
the birthplace of Patrick Henry and Henry Clay, 
and " blazed broader yet in after years " as the scene 
of some of the fellest conflicts of the civil war) a 
well-to-do planter named Samuel Morris. He by 
no means belonged to the upper class of Virginia 
society, but was a plain man, working with his 



116 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

own hands, and, according to a manuscript state- 
ment, joined the business of a mason to that of a 
planter. His soul had famished under the minis- 
trations of the fox-hunting, tavern-haunting parish 
clergy. But the Spirit of God had touched his 
heart, and the providence of God strangely brought 
the truth of the gospel within his grasp. Reaching 
blindly in the dark for some one to guide him in the 
way of life, he met the hand of Luther stretched out 
across two centuries, and bearing the commentary 
on the Epistle to the Galatians, that most individual 
and subjective of all commentaries, " wherein is set 
forth most excellently (as the title page reads) the 
glorious riches of God's grace, and the power of 
the gospel, to the joyful comfort and confirmation 
of all such as do hunger and thirst for justification 
in Christ Jesus." Full as it is of Christ, and of 
redemption through his blood alone, it would 
scarcely now be considered the fittest work to 
present to an inquiring soul. But in Hanover 
County books were few and scarce then; and of the 
dilute, sugared and illustrated books containing sal- 
vation made easy, there were none. The awakened 
mind of the tobacco-planter grappled with the 
strong, vigorous exhibitions of gospel grace con- 
tained in the commentary on what Luther fondly 
called his epistle, and was led by it to a clear and 
solid peace in believing. He hardly thought or 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 117 

knew that he was a converted man; but he felt the 
love of Christ in his heart, and that love constrained 
him to try and do good to the souls of his neigh- 
bors. He invited them to come to his house on 
Sundays and hear him read passages from a book 
which had exerted so marked an influence on his 
own feelings. They attended, and he read to them 
chapter after chapter of the Bible and Luther on the 
Galatians. 

That was all, absolutely. They knew nothing 
about extemporary prayer, and none of them durst 
attempt it. They had neither books nor culture for 
devotional singing. 

Dull service, we might think, to bring together 
the people of a county! But such a famine of the 
word had been bred by the " Honeymans," the 
" Hagans," and " Sampsons," who had been sent 
over to evangelize the "Virginians" — so hungry 
were the people for the bread of life — that to enjoy 
this meager worship they came trooping from a 
circuit of twenty, thirty or fifty miles. The gentle- 
man planter rode out through his long avenue, with 
his wife en cronpe or ambling on her palfrey beside 
him; the humbler farmer drove along his mule team 
or his ox cart loaded with his family; from the rude 
shanty and from the old English-like manor house 
on the banks of the Pamunkey or the Chicka- 
hominy came the eager throng; and on the outside 



118 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

hung a dusky fringe from the " quarter/' to catch 
what they could of that free gospel which pro- 
claims liberty to the captive and the opening of the 
prison doors to them that are bound. 

The meetings increased in interest, and conver- 
sions began to follow. The planter's house became 
too small for the congregation. Mr. Morris and 
some of his neighbors agreed to club together and 
put up a building — they had no thought of calling it 
a church — to accommodate the worshipers. It 
was known as Morris' Reading-House. The at- 
traction of this service was such that other neigh- 
borhoods desired to enjoy the same privilege. Mr. 
Morris became a lay reader at several different and 
distant stations; and the inquiry began to grow into 
a general awakening. 

In 1743 an improvement of the spiritual fare came 
in the shape of Whitefield's Sermons, then lately 
published, a copy of which was sent over from 
Scotland, and presented by the owner to Mr. Morris. 
The parish churches were neglected, and the people 
thronged to hear the simple story of the cross re- 
cited by these unauthorized lips. 

The clergy took the alarm and called on the 
courts to visit the offenders with the prescribed 
penalties for absence from public worship. Mr. 
Morris and his friends were summoned before the 
justices, interrogated and fined; he himself twenty 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 119 

different times. The laws of Virginia frowned as 
sternly on all religiones illicitas as did the laws of 
the twelve tables. To secure any toleration a 
worship must be at least that of some " national 
religion.'' 1 

The dissentients were summoned to declare what 
denomination of Christians they belonged to. The 
question puzzled them not a little. They knew 
nothing of any sect besides the Quakers, and they 
were certainly not Quakers. They asked leave to 
consult together before replying to His Honor's in- 
quiry. What they knew of gospel truth they had 
learned mostly from Martin Luther. The vanity of 
all outward services and formal rituals when the 
troubled conscience is crying out for peace, and the 
solid ground of hope presented in free justification 
through the grace that is in Christ Jesus, com- 
mended itself to their own experience. They came 
into court and answered that "they were Luther- 
ans." Lutheranism was a national religion, and 
though the respondents only meant that they 
agreed with Luther in his views of the gospel, they 
escaped under this cover the punishment denounced 
against " sectarians." 

1 On the subject of Samuel Morris and the Presbyterians in Vir- 
ginia, see Foote's Sketches of Presbyterian Churches, p. 1 19; Dr. 
Miller's Memoir of Dr. John Rodders, p. 27, sqq. ; Dr. Rice's His- 
tory, p. H3> 1 86, 330, sqq. ; Bishop Meade's Old Churches and 
Families of Virginia, vol. i, p. 426. 



120 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

Two English statutes respecting religious worship 
bore, or were alleged to bear, on the condition of 
the " Dissenters " in America. One was the Act of 
Uniformity of Queen Elizabeth, as further modified 
and extended in the reign of James I and Charles 
II, making all dissent from the worship of the Es- 
tablished Church penal. The other was the Toler- 
ation Act of the Revolution government of 1688, 
which made cautious provision for the relief of dis- 
senters. It did not, in terms, apply to the colonies. 
Indeed the specific mention of " England, Scotland, 
Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and the islands of 
Jersey and Guernsey " as the scope of its operation 
might seem to exclude them; and the king's attor- 
neys in Virginia always denied the right of the 
Presbyterians to avail themselves of its protection. 
It was at best a meager and ungracious concession, 
and left the freedom of worship hampered with 
vexatious conditions. 1 

In the varying and unsettled state of judicial de- 
cisions on this point, colonial dissenting preachers 
were treated with more or less rigor according to 
the tempers of royal governors or county justices; 
sometimes indulged on clearing themselves by oath 
of all suspicion of Unitarianism, popery or jacobit- 
ism; sometimes fined and driven out of the country. 

While Mr. Morris and his friends were passing 

1 See the act in A T eaVs History of the Puritans, Appendix XIII. 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 121 

through this ordeal it happened that the Rev. Wil- 
liam Robinson came, preaching as an evangelist, 
into the Valley of Virginia. He was the son of a 
wealthy English Quaker, but himself a Presbyterian, 
a member of the Presbytery of New Brunswick and 
a zealous, rousing preacher of the gospel. 1 He was 
heard on some occasion by persons who had been 
accustomed to attend on the reading services of Mr. 
Morris. The latter was informed of this new evan- 
gelist and of the harmony of his doctrines with 
those of Luther and Whitefield. The result was an 
invitation to Mr. Robinson to preach on a set day in 
Morris' Reading-House. 

Notice was widely given and great crowds came 
together at the appointed time. But highly recom- 
mended as Mr. Robinson was for his evangelic zeal 
and faithfulness, these simple souls were jealous for 
the purity of the gospel. While the congregation 
waited they took the evangelist aside and put him 
through a course of thorough examination on the 
leading doctrines. The result was satisfactory, and 
Mr. Robinson preached on that and several follow- 
ing days with great acceptance and a manifest 
blessing. They found themselves in perfect accord 
and sympathy with him. After a while it occurred 
to them somehow to ask him to what denomination 
of Christians he belonged. He said he was a Pres- 

1 Annals of the American Pulpit, iii, 92. 



122 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

byterian. They then said that they believed they 
were Presbyterians too. 1 

This was the germ of that strong vigorous Pres- 
byterian Christianity which filled up and overflowed 
from that district, and of which the Presbytery of 
Hanover was the first organized representative. 
Mr. Robinson's preaching made a profound impres- 
sion. The people wished to express their gratitude 
by presenting him a considerable sum of money. 
He declined to receive it. They urged it upon him, 
but still he refused. They then placed it secretly in 
his saddlebags the evening before he was to leave. 
Detecting the kindly fraud, he no longer resisted, 
but informed the donors that he would appropriate 
the money to the use of a young man of his ac- 
quaintance who was studying for the ministry 
under embarrassed circumstances. " As soon as he 
is licensed," said Mr. Robinson, " we will send him 
to visit you. It may be that you are now by your 
liberality providing a minister for yourselves." 

They little knew the splendid result to which they 
were contributing, for that poor young man was 
Samuel Davies, the alpha in that southern cross of 
flaming evangelists who poured the light of the 
gospel on the "Ancient Dominion." Feeble in 

1 It is not pretended in this brief historical sketch to give all the 
particulars, but merely to seize on the more salient points of the 
story. 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 12;* 

health and with the prospect, too surely realized, of 
an early death, he preached literally as a dying man 
to dying hearers. A more burning zeal, a more in- 
tense devotion to the work of saving men, a more 
heroic fidelity to truth and duty has never signal- 
ized the* American pulpit. Four years after the 
events just related, in company with his intimate 
and equally distinguished friend, John Rodgers, he 
made his way to Hanover County, where he entered 
into and superseded the work of the friends who 
had helped in his education. It was only after an 
energetic struggle that he succeeded in vindicating 
his right to preach the gospel in Virginia, while his 
associate, notwithstanding the friendly disposition 
of Governor Gooch, was rudely refused a license 
and driven out of the colony. 1 

1 Soon after Mr. Rodgers reached Williamsburg, one of the Es- 
tablished clergy of Hanover, who had followed him, appeared be- 
fore Sir William Gooch and complained that this young gentleman 
before going to Williamsburg had preached one sermon in Han- 
over contrary to law, urging Sir William to proceed against him 
with rigor. Sir William's reply did equal honor to his religious 

sentiments and his official liberality : " Mr. , I am surprised 

at you. You profess to be a minister of Jesus Christ, and you 
come to me to complain of a man and wish me to punish him for 
preaching the gospel! For shame, sir ! Go home and mind your 
own duty. For such a piece of conduct you deserve to have your 
gown stript over your shoulders." — Dr. Miller's Life of Dr. John 
Rodgers, p. 54. 

See the noble vindication of himself by Mr. Davies, addressed 
under date nth May, 175 1, to the Bishop of London, in the 
Princeton Repertory for 1840. 



124 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

Throughout this region Samuel Davies continued to 
preach with apostolic zeal, wearing out his frail 
body by extraordinary fatigues and exposures, till 
called for the short remainder of his brilliant career 
to succeed Jonathan Edwards in the presidency of 
the College of New Jersey. 1 

Other Presbyterian missionaries followed Mr. 
Robinson into Virginia. Congregations were 
gathered and churches organized; and on the 3d of 
October, 1755, the Synod of New York, reaching 

1 The just and elegant inscription on his tombstone in the 
Princeton cemetery, perhaps from the classical pen of Samuel 
Finley, who succeeded him so soon in the presidency and was so 
soon laid beside him in the grave, is as follows : — 

" Sub hoc marmore sepulchrali, mortales exuviae reverendi per- 
quam viri Samuel Davies, A. M., collegii nov caesariensis praesidis, 
iuturum Domini adventum praestolantur. Ne te, viator, ut pauca 
de tanto tamque dile^to viro resciscas, paulisper morari pigeat. 
Natus est in comitatu de New Castle juxta Delaware 3 Novembris, 
anno salutis reparatae, 1724. S. N. Sacris ibidem initiatus, 19 
Februarii, 1747, tutelam pastoralem ecclesiae in comitatu de Han- 
over Virginiensium suscepit. Ibi per 1 1 plus minus annos ministri 
evangelici labonbus indefesse et favente numine auspicato per- 
functus, ad munus praesidiale collegii nov caesariensis gerendum 
vocatus est, et inauguratus, 26 Julii, 1759, S. N. Sed, proh rerum 
inane, intra biennium febre correptus, candidam animam co-lo 
redidit, 4 Februarii, 1761. Heu ! quam exiguum vitae curriculum ! 
Corpore fuit eximis ; gestu liberali, placido, augusto. Ingenii nitore, 
morum integritate, munificentia, facilitate, inter paocus illustris. 

Rei literarise peritus ; theologus promptust, perspicax. In 
rostris, per eloquium blandum, mellitum, vehemens simul et per- 
stringens, nulli secundus. Scriptor ornatus, sublimis, disertus. 
Praesertim viro pietate ardcnte in Deum zelo et rehgione spectan- 
dus." — Alden's American Epitaphs, Pentade I, vol. i, Art. 155. 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 125 

over into Virginia, ordered the erection of a new 
presbytery by the name of the Presbytery of Han- 
over. The original members were the Rev. Samuel 
Davies, John Todd, Alexander Craighead, Robert 
Henry, John Wright and John Brown. The first 
meeting was appointed to be held in Hanover, and 
opened with a sermon by Mr. Davies. 

This was the presbytery that now came forward 
to maintain against the eloquence of Patrick Henry 
and the zeal of Peyton Randolph the imperiled 
cause of religious liberty. In the most energetic 
terms - they rejected for themselves, and reprobated 
for all others, any share in the proceeds of so ill- 
omened and illegitimate a partnership. They drew 
with a firm hand the line of demarkation between 
the functions of the Church and the State; showed 
the uselessness as well as the danger of attempting 
to support public worship by compulsory taxation; 
and insisted that any such measure was but the be- 
ginning of a usurpation, the end of which no man 
could determine. " These consequences," they said 
in conclusion, "are so plain as not to be denied; 
and they are so entirely subversive of religious 
liberty, that if they should take place in Virginia we 
should be reduced to the melancholy necessity of 
saying with the apostles in like cases, 'Judge ye 
whether it is best to obey God or men,' and also of 
acting as they acted." 



126 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

" Therefore, as it is contrary to our principles and 
interest, and as we think subversive of religious 
liberty, we do again most earnestly entreat that our 
legislature would never extend any assessment for 
religious purposes to us or to the congregations 
under our care." 

This vigorous protest decided the question for 
the time, and on the third reading the bill was re- 
jected. 

One other brief struggle remained. The idea of 
the necessity of a union of Church and State in 
some form had been so wrought into the Virginia 
mind, and the members of the old dominant Church 
reconciled themselves with so much difficulty to a 
simple equality with other sects, that on the conclu- 
sion of peace they came forward with a new at- 
tempt to recover their lost prerogatives. The pro- 
ject for a general assessment for religious purposes 
was revived, and a bill was introduced in the legis- 
lature for securing to the Episcopal Church all the 
property, glebe lands, etc., it had received from the 
State before the Revolution. This involved the re- 
building by public tax of all decayed or destroyed 
parish churches, the restoration of all sequestered 
church effects, and possibly also the payment of all 
arrears of clerical salaries. 

The legislature of Virginia was, to a considerable 
extent, a system of pocket boroughs. The old 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 127 

hereditary legislators, the Nicholases, Randolphs, 
Lees, Pendletons, etc., had all been connected with 
the Established Church. They received the bill 
with great favor, and there was danger of its being 
rushed through in advance of any resistance. But 
the ever-vigilant Presbytery of Hanover again came 
to the front and threw themselves into the breach. 
They had grown into veterans in the service of relig- 
ious liberty, and shrunk from no conflict. A 
prompt, decided remonstrance from them brought 
the legislature to a pause. 

The Presbyterian clergy seized the opportunity 
to act in mass. They came together in conven- 
tion, adopted a new memorial and sent Dr. John 
Blair Smith, one of the most honored names in 
the history of the Church, to lay it before the 
House of Delegates. His argument of three 
days' duration settled the question finally and 
forever. The bill was dropped, never to be 
revived. 

This sounded the death knell of all Church 
establishment in America. Other States followed 
or walked pari passu with Virginia in the work of 
reform. With comparatively little resistance the 
union of Church and State was swept from the 
statute books of Delaware and Maryland, of New 
York, of North and South Carolina and Georgia; 
and religion, released from all trammels of human 



128 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

imposition, walked free and majestic in our emanci- 
pated States. 

I cannot but lament that the name of that heroic 
presbytery, which stood foremost in the battle by 
which this victory was won, has, for the present, 
disappeared from our roll. Well may we be proud 
of a church that walked upright and unfaltering in 
the path of freedom when Patrick Henry stumbled. 

With this defensive victory the Presbytery of 
Hanover was content. The Episcopal Church 
indeed still retained a large amount of property, 
real and movable, which had been acquired by the 
proceeds of a general tax on all the inhabitants; 
particularly the glebe lands, of which most of the 
parishes in Virginia were possessed to the extent 
of not less than two hundred acres each. The first 
General Assembly of Virginia, after the adoption of 
the State Constitution in October, 1776, ordained 
"that there shall in all time coming be saved and 
reserved to the use of the Church by law estab- 
lished, the several tracts of glebe lands already 
purchased, the churches and chapels already built, 
and such as were begun or contracted for before 
the passing of the said act for the use of the 
parishes; all books, plate and ornaments belonging 
to or appropriated to the use of the said church, and 
all arrears of money or tobacco arising from former 
assessments or otherwise." 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 1'29 

This act recognized the Episcopal Church as 
still "established by law," and preserved to it in 
perpetuity the ownership of the glebe lands and 
other church property possessed before the Revolu- 
tion. Being simply an act of the legislature, it was 
of course liable to repeal by any subsequent assem- 
bly; and considering their previous experience, it 
is not strange that other denominations should view 
with jealousy the slightest appearance of any 
concession of peculiar advantages to the Episcopal 
Church. 

But it was not the Presbyterians who came 
forward to prosecute the quarrel against her. It 
was another body of Christians, the Baptists,, who 
in their previous unorganized condition had suf- 
fered even more than Presbyterians from the laws 
against sectarian and unlicensed worship, that now, 
in their hour of triumph, turned against their late 
persecutors. 

It was the " Baptists and their abettors" who 
urged the resumption by the State of the Chuch 
lands. This object they prosecuted year after year 
with unabated determination, until, in 1801. success 
crowned their efforts and the glebes were publicly 
sold. 

Dr. Baird maintains that this act of confiscation 
was unconstitutional, and adds that " the opposition 
to the Episcopal Church toward the end of the 



130 THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH 

century was marked by a cruelty which admits of 
no apology." l 

Not throwing any doubt whatever on the correct- 
ness of these opinions, we may yet observe that 
none of the melancholy consequences apprehended 
by the Episcopal clergy followed this spoliation. 
The glebes had been of little or no value to them. 
They consisted often of wild and unproductive 
lands. The advantage of being relieved from the 
odium of depending in any way on State bounty 
greatly overbalanced the small material loss. The 
laity came up to the demands of the voluntary 
system and assumed, no doubt cheerfully, the sup- 
port of their own clergy. The character of the 
latter underwent a great and beneficent revolution. 
Purified by trials and led (after 1827) by their 
excellent prelate, Bishop Meade, they took on that 
devout, exemplary, evangelical type which has 
always since characterized the Virginia clergy. 

1 Baird's Religion in America, I., iii ; Collections of the Protestant 
Episcopal Historical Society for 185 1, pp. 166-181. 

The Address of the Rector of Antrim Parish, on the proposed 
sale of the glebes in Virginia, is a modest and pathetic document, 
and serves to show how sweet are the uses of adversity for churches 
as well as for individuals. 



AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 131 



IV 



Internal view of the church from the close of the 
war to the adoption of the new constitution, 

I783-I786 

It remains to add a brief outline of the history of 
the synod from the close of the war to the close of 
its own career as the chief court of the Presbyterian 
Church. 

Articles of peace between Great Britain and her 
revolted colonies were signed at Paris, November 
30, 1782. The war had virtually terminated a year 
before by the surrender at Yorktown of the last 
British army on the soil of America. The synod of 
1783 met in the city of Philadelphia, undisturbed by 
any apprehensions of being abruptly adjourned to 
Bedminster or elsewhere by the approach of hostile 
forces. The attendance was small. The pastors 
were like men who had just escaped a great dis- 
aster, and were busied in gathering together their 
scattered effects and studying to repair the ruin. 
Money was wanting for the expenses of travel. 
The irredeemable paper currency had sunk to only 
a nominal value. It may be mentioned in illustration 
that the janitor who waited on the synod received 
for his services three dollars in specie, which seems 
to have been regarded as equivalent to two hundred 



132 FROM THE CLOSE OF TEE WAR 

dollars continental currency, the amount that was 
paid the janitor the year previous. 

The synod at once applied itself to the work of 
repairing the spiritual desolations caused by the 
war. They passed the emphatic disclaimer, already 
referred to, of any wish for advantages over their 
brethren of other denominations. They sent out to 
the churches a pastoral letter of congratulation and 
warning on the success of the American arms. 

" We cannot help congratulating you," they say, 
" on the general and almost universal attachment of 
the Presbyterian body to the cause of liberty and 
the rights of mankind. This has been visible in 
their conduct, and has been confessed by the com- 
plaints and resentment of the common enemy. 
Such a circumstance ought not only to afford us 
satisfaction on the review, as bringing credit to the 
body in general, but to increase our gratitude to 
God for the happy issue of the war. Had it been 
unsuccessful, we must have drunk deeply of the 
cup of suffering. Our burnt and wasted churches, 
and our plundered dwellings, in such places as fell 
under the power of our adversaries, are but an 
earnest of what we must have suffered had they 
finally prevailed. 

''The synod, therefore, request you to render 
thanks to Almighty God for all his mercies, spiritual 
and temporal, and in a particular manner for estab- 



TO ADOPTION OF NEW CONSTITUTION 133 

lishing the independence of the United States of 
America. He is the supreme Disposer, and to him 
belong the glory, the victory and the majesty. We 
are persuaded you will easily recollect many cir- 
cumstances in the course of the struggle which 
point out his special and signal interposition in our 
favor. Our most remarkable successes have gen- 
erally been when things had just before worn the 
most unfavorable aspect, as at Trenton and Sara- 
toga at the beginning, in South Carolina and 
Virginia toward the end, of the war." They 
specify among other mercies the assistance derived 
from France, and the happy selection "of a com- 
mander in chief of the armies of the United States, 
who, in this important and difficult charge, has 
given universal satisfaction, who was alike accept- 
able to the citizen and the soldier, to the State in 
which he was born and to every other on the con- 
tinent, and whose character and influence, after so 
long service, are not only unimpaired but aug- 
mented." ] 

The scarcity of copies of the Bible had long been 
felt as a serious evil. The colonies had been accus- 
tomed to depend on the mother country for a sup- 
ply, and during the war this source had been cut 
off. An edition of the Scriptures was, for their 
feeble typographical resources, an immense under- 

1 Hodge's History of the Presbyterian Church, ii, 495. 



134 FROM THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 

taking. But in 1781 an enterprising Philadelphia 
printer, Robert Aitkin, had successfully accom- 
plished it, and both religious and patriotic motives 
led the synod warmly to second the effort. " Tak- 
ing into consideration the situation of many people 
under their care who, through the indigence of 
their circumstances, are not able to purchase Bibles 
and are in danger of perishing for lack of knowl- 
edge," they ordered contributions to be made for 
this purpose in all congregations, and appointed a 
committee to receive and apply them. " And as 
Mr. Aitkin, from laudable motives and with great 
expense, hath undertaken and executed an elegant 
impression of the Holy Scriptures, which on ac- 
count of the importation of Bibles from Europe will 
be very injurious to his temporal circumstances, 
synod further agree that the said committee shall 
purchase Bibles of the said impression and no other; 
and earnestly recommend it to all to purchase such 
in preference to any other." 

Whatever brings appropriately into view the 
character of that illustrious chief whom Providence 
had indeed preserved, as Davies prophetically saw, 
"for some important service to his country," and 
who had shown in his own example "how noble 
a virtue is patience, and how sure, when rightly 
exercised, of its own reward," will be regarded as 
suitable for these pages. 



TO ADOPTION OF NEW CONSTITUTION 135 

Dr. John Rodgers had served during a part of the 
war as chaplain of Heath's brigade. The Christian 
philanthropy and the resources of more recent 
times have provided that no soldier, even of such 
vast armies as those which crushed the French Em- 
pire in 1870, shall be unfurnished with at least the 
New Testament Scriptures. But beyond the preach- 
ing of the chaplain, the revolutionary troops enjoyed 
no means whatever for religious instruction. As 
the disbanding of the army was at hand, Dr. 
Rodgers earnestly desired that each soldier should 
receive as a parting gift from his country a copy of 
the word of life. The i2mo edition of Mr. Aitkin, 
just before issued, furnished the opportunity, and 
Dr. Rodgers addressed a letter to General Washing- 
ton congratulating him on the restoration of peace 
and soliciting his cooperation in canying out this 
scheme. General Washington replied as follows: — 

"Headquarters, iithjune, 1783. 

"Dear Sir: I accept, with much pleasure, your 
kind congratulations on the happy event of peace, 
with the establishment of our liberties and inde- 
pendence. 

" Glorious indeed has been our contest — glorious 
if we consider the prize for which we have con- 
tended, and glorious in its issue. But in the midst 
of our joys, I hope we shall not forget that to 
divine Providence is to be ascribed the glory and 
praise. 

"Your proposition respecting Mr. Aitkin's Bible 
would have been particularly noticed by me had it 



136 FROM THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 

been suggested in season. But the late resolution 
of Congress for discharging part of the army, taking 
off near two-thirds of our members, it is now too 
late to make the attempt. It would have pleased 
me well if Congress had been pleased to make such 
an important present to the brave fellows who have 
done so much for the security of their country's 
right and establishment. 

" I hope it will not be long before you will be 
able to go quietly to New York. Some patience, 
however, will yet be necessary. But patience is a 
noble virtue, and when rightly exercised, does not 
fail of its reward. 

"With much regard and esteem, I am, dear 
doctor, 

" Your most obedient servant, 

" Go. Washington." 

The synod also entered on measures for securing 
uniformity in the public praise of the Church. A 
committee was appointed to compare all the extant 
versions of psalmody and digest from them "one 
more suitable to our circumstances and taste than 
any we have got;" a scheme which has only been 
successfully carried out in our own immediate 
times. 

Action in regard to marriage within the prohib- 
ited degrees, as supposed to be defined by the Le- 
vitical law; in regard to slavery and the baptism of 
slave children: in regard to the demission of the 
ministry (refusing to permit the names of secularized 
ministers to be dropped from the roll); in regard to 
the pastoral visitation of common schools (inviting 



TO ADOPTION OF NEW CONSTITUTION 137 

other churches to cooperate in this work); cate- 
chetical instruction in families, etc., — was taken 
during these years. 

The formation of new presbyteries broadened the 
geographical area of the Church; and it was found 
impossible in the condition of peace, as it had been 
during the disturbance of war, to secure the attend- 
ance of the remoter members. So long as it was 
made the business of no one in particular to attend, 
whole presbyteries were not infrequently absent. 

It was quite natural, therefore, that attention 
should now be directed to the necessity of perfect- 
ing the organization of the Church, by providing 
for a representative assembly to be constituted of 
elected delegates. The thirteen States were occu- 
pied with this question at the same time with the 
thirteen presbyteries; and the preliminaries for a 
General Assembly and a Federal Congress went on 
pari passu. This measure was first brought before 
the synod by an overture in 1785, and was made a 
special order for the year following, all the pres- 
byteries being notified and expressly charged to 
attend. 1 

At the time fixed— viz., at the sederunt of the 

1 The thirteen presbyteries at that time were New York, Xew 
Brunswick, P^irst Philadelphia, Second Philadelphia, Xew Castle, 
Donegal, Lewes, Hanover, Orange, Dutchess, Suffolk, Redstone 
and South Carolina. 



138 FROM THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 

19th of May, 1786 — after full discussion it was re- 
solved that, "considering the number and extent 
of the churches under our care, and the inconve- 
nience of the present mode of government by one 
synod, this synod will establish out of its own body 
three or more subordinate synods, out of which 
shall be composed a General Assembly, synod or 
council, agreeably to a system hereafter to be 
adopted/' 

At this point the present chapter closes. The 
successful carrying out of this important measure, 
the new impulse given by it to the growth of the 
Church, her subsequent trials and triumphs, fall to 
be related by another hand. 

A few miscellaneous remarks niay be allowed in 
conclusion. 

The Presbyterian clergy of the Revolutionary 
period were well-educated men. Almost without 
exception they were graduates of American or for- 
eign colleges. The era of modern science had not 
yet dawned, and a far larger proportion of the col- 
lege curriculum than now consisted of drill in the 
elements of the Greek and Latin languages. French 
and German were almost entirely unknown. The 
Latin was still to a considerable extent the common 
language in which educated men of different nations 
did or might communicate with each other. Latin 



TO ADOPTION OF NEW CONSTITUTION 139 

epistolary correspondence was still not wholly obso- 
lete. Latin epitaphs were still almost universal for 
scholars, and the official proceedings at college 
commencements were conducted entirely in that 
language. The ability to read and write Latin was 
therefore a necessary part of the culture of a Pres- 
byterian clergyman, and it was with justice and 
reason that candidates for the ministry were re- 
quired to present among other " trial-pieces " a 
Latin exegesis on some common head in divinity. 
This they were quite competent to do with integ- 
rity and with reasonable correctness of style. The 
surviving Latin compositions of the time are not in- 
ferior to those of the contemporaneous English or 
Continental scholars. The very different distribu- 
tion of the students' time in our present academical 
and college course, and the introduction of the 
modern languages as media of communication be- 
tween alien scholars, sufficiently explains the decay 
of Latin scholarship among us. That few candi- 
dates for the Presbyterian ministry are now able to 
compose correctly in the Latin language, and that 
the exegesis still required of them furnishes no test 
whatever (except a negative one) of their acquaint- 
ance with that language, is notorious; yet out of 
regard to the supposed requirement of the Form of 
Government, and in oversight of the alternative 
permission to employ "these or other similar exer- 



140 FROM THE CLOSE OF THE WAR 

rises" as tests of the candidate's literary fitness for 
the ministry, it is still commonly insisted on. 
Surely the time has come for dispensing with a 
measure which is both futile and fraudulent, and 
tends to throw ridicule on the serious business of 
licensing candidates to preach the gospel. 

The pulpit style of the Presbyterian clergy of a 
hundred years ago presents generally a good ex- 
ample of strong, plain, undefiled English. It was 
wholly free from those affectations and tricks of 
speech by which feebleness of thought is sometimes 
attempted to be disguised. The prose of Dean Swift, 
of Addison and the English divines of the seven- 
teenth century was their standard. When Samuel 
Johnson, with his customary suavity, said to Dr. 
John Ewing, " Sir, what do you know in America ? 
You never read. You have no books there." " Par- 
don me, sir," was the reply, "we have read the 
Rambler;" which was doubtless true to a limited 
extent; but the inflated periods of that writer were 
no more to the taste of American scholars than his 
exaggerated toryism. During the hundred years 
that have since passed, the language has undergone 
no change. In the works of Dr. Rodgers, Stanhope 
Smith, Samuel Finley and their brethren, not a word 
will be found that is not now in good pulpit use. 
The sermons of Samuel Davies might be preached 
to-day, and only excite surprise for the somewhat 



TO ADOPTION OF NEW CONSTITUTION 141 

elaborate eloquence of the style, and the extraordi- 
nary force and pungency of their dealing with the 
conscience. Indeed, it was only in the colonial 
pulpit that the evangelical preaching of Howe and 
Baxter found an uninterrupted succession. The 
Hnglish language in its higher purity of written and 
spoken use, and evangelical preaching in its fullest 
development, came across the sea with the colo- 
nists, and domiciled themselves here by the altars of 
liberty. 

The church architecture of the Revolutionary 
period in America was of course of a rude and 
simple character. The natural arches of the forest, 
from which the churches were hewn by the axes 
of the worshipers, as well as the heavy pressure 
of snow which the roofs were each winter required 
to sustain, would naturally have suggested Gothic 
form. But scientific knowledge of architecture was 
wholly lacking in the colonies; with each new 
settlement the demand for a sanctuary was imme- 
diate, and^the people satisfied their need by the 
same hasty carpentry by which the sons of the 
prophets enlarged their accommodations at Gilgal. 
The first rough log churches had mostly given place 
a hundred years ago to plain white-painted struc- 
tures, with straight-backed pews, lofty galleries and 
a pulpit perched halfway between the floor and the 
ceiling. Stove, upholstery, organ, they had none. 



142 CHURCH ARCHITECTURE 

Church spires were by no means common, and 
bells were almost unknown, except in the larger 
cities. Even in New York an Episcopal congrega- 
tion was indebted to the Lutherans for the loan of a 
church bell. 

The day of peace and freedom had begun. The 
plowshare of war had broken up the public in- 
sensibility; the sowers went forth to sow. Divine 
influences came down as rain upon the mown 
grass, and the beneficent fruits of revivals of re- 
ligion, missions and church enterprise of every kind 
began to appear. 



From the Adoption of the Presbyte- 
rian Form of Government to the Re- 



union 



American independence has been achieved. The 
colonies have taken their place as free and independ- 
ent States among the nations of the earth. In bring- 
ing about this the most momentous political event 
of the last century the ministry and laity of the 
Presbyterian Church bore an essential and a con- 
spicuous part. These men were the descendants 
of the Huguenots whose blood, shed in the cause 
of religious freedom, had baptized almost every 
acre of France; of the Dutch, who under William 
the Silent, had struggled and fought against civil 
and religious despotism amidst the dikes of Holland; 
of the Scotchmen who signed the Covenant with 
the warm blood of their veins, and who had fought 
to the death under the blue banner of that Cove- 
nant; of the heroes whose valor at Londonderry 
turned the scale in favor of the Prince of Orange 
and secured the Protestant succession in England — 

143 



144 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

sons of the women who, during that memorable 
siege, carried ammunition to the soldiers, and in 
the crisis of the assault, sprang to the breach, hurled 
back the assailants and turned the tide of battle in 
the critical, imminent moment of the conflict. 

These were not the men to be dazzled by specious 
pretexts, or to stand nicely balancing arguments of 
expediency, when issues touching human freedom 
were at stake. These were not the men to barter 
away their birthright for pottage. They who had 
endured so much in the cause of freedom in the Old 
World, who, for its sake, had left all and braved the 
perils of the ocean to seek a refuge in the forests of 
an unbroken wilderness, were not the men tamely 
to submit their necks to the yoke, how smoothly 
soever it might be fitted for them by the deft hands 
of king, Church or Parliament. Consequently, the 
Presbyterians in the colonies were almost to a man, 
and to a woman, patriots "indeed, in whom there 
was no guile." 

In a Presbyterian community not far from the 
spot where the first blood of the Revolution was 
shed, in a Presbyterian convention which had for 
its presiding officer a ruling elder, was framed and 
promulgated the Mecklenburg Declaration, which 
embodied the spirit and the principles of the Decla- 
ration of Independence, and which antedates that 
document by the space of a year and more; and 



TO THE REUNION 145 

even earlier than this, within the bounds of old 
Redstone Presbytery, the "Westmoreland Decla- 
ration " was made at Hanna's Town, in Western 
Pennsylvania. 

None in all the land better understood the nature 
of the struggle, or more thoroughly appreciated the 
importance of the issue, than those men. They 
saw in the impending conflict more than a tax on 
tea or a penny stamp on paper — more even than 
"taxation without representation." In addition to 
political tyranny they perceived the ominous shadow 
of spiritual despotism, which threatened to darken 
the land to which they had fled as an asylum, and 
they esteemed their fortunes and their lives a cheap 
sacrifice at which to purchase for their posterity in 
succeeding generations the blessings of religious 
freedom. 

Into the struggle, therefore, they threw themselves 
heart and soul. With enthusiastic devotion, they 
put at the service of their country the last penny of 
their substance and the last drop of their blood. 
Wherever a Presbyterian church was planted, 
wherever the Westminster Confession of Faith 
found adherents, wherever the Presbyterian polity 
was loved and honored, there intelligent and pro- 
found convictions in regard to civil and religious 
liberty were developed as naturally as the oak 
grows from the acorn, and there, when the crisis 



146 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT . 

came, strong arms and stout hearts formed an 
invulnerable bulwark for the cause of human free- 
dom. As the Spartan defended his shield, as the 
Roman legions fought for their eagles, as a chival- 
rous knight leaped to the rescue of his sweetheart, 
so our Presbyterian ancestors, with a prodigal valor 
and an unquenchable ardor, sprang to the defense 
of their sacred rights. 

An adequate history of their services, their sacri- 
fices and their sufferings has never been written, 
and, alas! never can be written now. No monu- 
ments have been left from which such a history 
can be compiled. In the pulpit, in the halls of the 
provincial and the Continental Congresses, in the 
army as chaplains and as soldiers, the ministers 
rendered invaluable service by their eloquence, their 
wisdom, their learning, their courage and their 
example, while the laity took into the ranks a 
heroism as stalwart as that of the Ironsides of 
Cromwell. Presbyterian blood from shoeless feet 
tracked the snow at Valley Forge. From the 
Schuylkill to the Chartiers pulpits rang with utter- 
ances which were at once scriptural and patriotic, 
and which were so sound and fearless and inspiring 
that they deserve to take rank in the series of 
kindred testimonies in the Scottish Church borne by 
such men as Knox, Buchanan, Rutherford, Brown 
of Wamphry, Cargill and Renwick. These utter- 



TO THE REUNION 117 

ances embodied principles which, emanating from 
the republic of Geneva, consecrated by the holiest 
blood of Scotland, sheltered and defended by 
more than Spartan heroism and endurance in the 
forests of America, now underlie the institutions 
of every free government on the face of the whole 
earth. 

Republicanism is Presbyterianism in the State; 
so that in the victory of our Revolutionary fore- 
fathers there was a triumph of principles in defense 
of which our ancestors in the ecclesiastical line had 
for generations poured out their blood like water. 
These principles could find no hospitable or con- 
genial home in Europe, and had fled for refuge to 
the great ocean-bound wilderness as their last 
hiding-place. A few half-clad, half-starved and 
not half-equipped regiments of provincial militia 
bore the ark which contained the charter of free- 
dom for the nations. They bore it bravely and 
well, and when the clouds o'f war drifted away, lo! 
there stood on these shores, disclosed to the gaze of 
the world, a Christian republic which, as a pharos, 
flings its light across the ocean to guide the foot- 
steps of nations in the path of liberty, of progress 
and of universal brotherhood. Every civilized 
nation on the globe has felt the throb of our free 
life. Over the ark of our liberties dwells the 
political shekinah of the world, to which all the 



148 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

oppressed shall look, and guided by which they 
shall at last be led into a large and goodly Canaan 
of civil and religious freedom. 

But the war is over. The transcendent achieve- 
ment has been won. After seven years of fierce 
and bitter struggle, dove-eyed Peace has spread 
over the land her shadowing wings, dripping with 
celestial benedictions. The inchoate elements of 
national life have crystallized into a compact and 
symmetrical republican government. The colonies 
have become States and the Constitution of the 
United States has been adopted. 

Owing to their pronounced and intense patriotism 
during the war, the Presbyterian ministers and 
churches had borne the brunt of the fury of the 
enemy. Pastors were driven away from their 
flocks, churches were turned into barracks or 
stables, and in many instances were torn down or 
burned. Congregations left without pastors, and 
exposed to all the deleterious influences of war, 
were scattered as sheep without a shepherd. 
Many churches could adopt the refrain of the 
prophet, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desola- 
tion. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our 
fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire: and 
all our pleasant things are laid zvaste. 

But as soon as the sword was returned to its 
scabbard the Church addressed herself to the task 



TO THE REUNION 149 

of restoring her broken walls, building up her 
waste places and gathering her scattered sheep to 
the fold again. With a sublime faith and an un- 
erring intuition she divined the future greatness of 
the nation, and hastened to make such adjustments 
in her polity and organization as would enable 
her to meet worthily present and prospective re- 
sponsibilities. 

The complete constitution of the Presbyterian 
Church in the United States of America, containing 
the Confession of Faith, the catechisms, the govern- 
ment and discipline, and the directory for the wor- 
ship of God, was finally ratified and adopted by the 
Synod of New York and Philadelphia in the year 
1788; and at the same meeting the necessary steps 
were taken toward the formation of a General As- 
sembly by dividing the synod into four synods, and 
by ordering that a General Assembly, constituted 
out of the " said four synods," should meet in Phila- 
delphia in May of the following year. 

Thus organized and equipped, the Church stands 
abreast of the new era, " her loins girt about 
with truth, her feet shod with the preparation of 
the gospel of peace," in her hand "the sword of 
the Spirit " and with her face set toward the West. 

The first General Assembly of the Presbyterian 
Church in the United States of America met in the 
Second Presbyterian Church in the city of Philadel- 



150 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

phia on May 21, 1789, and was opened, according 
to the appointment of synod, with a sermon by Dr. 
Witherspoon. 

In fancy let us visit this small but august body of 
men. 

In the moderator's chair is the courtly Dr. 
Rodgers, and at the clerk's table sits the chivalrous 
Duffield — whose ancestors, reaching America by way 
of England, Scotland and Ireland, had their Hugue- 
not blood enriched with Puritanic and Covenant- 
ing ingredients — who during the war had preached 
under fire, and who, along with Beatty, had braved 
the perils of the wilderness in crossing the Alle- 
ghanies, in order to set up the standard of Presby- 
terianism on the banks of the Monongahela, the 
Allegheny and the Ohio, and to proffer the blessings 
of the gospel to the Indians on the banks of the 
Muskingum. On the. floor is Dr. Witherspoon, of 
distinguished presence and of still more distin- 
guished achievement, the eminent divine, the able 
statesman, the pure and valiant patriot, who shone 
alike conspicuously in the pulpit, on the floor of 
Congress and in the president's chair, in whose 
veins ran the blood of John Knox, and whose 
whole life proved him to be a worthy descendant 
of the great Scottish Reformer. Beside him, and 
coming from the same presbytery (New Brunswick), 
and destined to be his successor in the presidency 



TO THE REUNION 151 

of the College of New Jersey, is the eloquent and 
learned Dr. Stanhope Smith, the founder of 
Hampden-Sidney College, now in the fullness of his 
marvelous powers and at the zenith of his splendid 
fame, whose oratory recalled the grandeur of Davies 
and did not suffer in comparison with that of Patrick 
Henry. 

There, too, is the polyhistoric, the encyclopedic 
scholar, the profound divine, the accomplished prov- 
ost of the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Ewing, 
who on an hour's notice could lecture on any sub- 
ject in the curriculum of the university, who was 
the peer of Rittenhouse in mathematics, and who in 
conversation could keep old Dr. Samuel Johnson at 
bay. From Baltimore comes the renowned Dr. 
Patrick Allison, who went to that place when it 
contained only thirty or forty houses, and in a log 
hut had preached to a congregation of six families, 
but whose usefulness and reputation grew with the 
growth of the city, until, as a preacher, a presbyter 
and an accomplished and fearless controversialist, 
no one stood above him, and of whom Dr. Stanhope 
Smith said, "Dr. Allison is decidedly the ablest 
statesman we have in the General Assembly of 
the Presbyterian Church." There, too, is Cooper, 
one of the Apostles of the Cumberland Valley, a 
valiant military as well as spiritual leader; and the 
ungainly but saintly Moses Hoge, of Virginia, who, 



152 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

destitute of the natural gifts and graces of oratory, 
so moved men by his " blood earnestness" that John 
Randolph said, " That man is the best of orators; " 
and McWhorter, who had been the chaplain of 
Knox's brigade, and who in the darkest hour of 
the Revolution hastened to headquarters to encour- 
age the commander in chief; and Azel Roe, who 
inspired a cowardly regiment with courage and 
then led them into battle, and who was as full of 
humor as he was of courage and patriotism; and 
Latta, who with blanket and knapsack had accom- 
panied members of his church to the camp and the 
battle field; and Dr. Sproat, in the pastorate the suc- 
cessor of Gilbert Tennent and the predecessor of 
Ashbel Green; and Dr. Robert Smith, who at the 
age of fifteen, having caught the spirit of Whitefield 
and having consecrated all the strength of a vigorous 
body to the work of preaching the gospel, was 
abundant in labors, and with his hand on the plow 
never once looked back; and Dr. Thomas Read, 
whose extensive missionary labors in the wilds of 
Delaware gave him so accurate a knowledge of the 
roads, paths and bypaths of the region, that he was 
the only man who could extricate Washington and 
his army from the perilous position which they 
occupied at Stanton, before the battle of Brandy- 
wine, so that the modest pastor of Drawyer's Creek 
may be denominated the saviour of his country; 



TO THE REUNION 153 

and the genial Dr. Matthew Wilson, who was both 
a divine and a physician and eminent in both pro- 
fessions, — good men and true, all of them, who had 
"endured hardness as good soldiers" both in the 
cause of Christ and for their country. 

In point of numbers this assembly was not large, 
there being on the roll only thirty-four commission- 
ers, representing thirteen presbyteries, but in point 
of dignity, learning, ability, zeal and experience it 
compares favorably with any of its many illustrious 
successors. An able committee, raised for the pur- 
pose, reported fifteen rules for the government of 
the body, which have since been supplemented but 
never improved, so that substantially these are the 
rules by which, to this day, the General Assembly 
has been governed. Drs. Witherspoon, Allison and 
Stanhope Smith, the ablest committee which the 
Assembly could command, drew up an address to 
George Washington, President of the United States, 
which address, as a document, is worthy of the 
genius and eloquence of these three illustrious men, 
and which, while it has nothing in it of the cringing 
servility and sycophancy which are begotten of the 
adulterous union of Church and State, is yet, at the 
same time, a dignified and loyal acknowledgment 
of the " powers that be " as " ordained of God." 

Regarding with apprehension the fact that many 
of the presbyteries had failed to send commissioners, 



154 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

and thoroughly comprehending the importance of 
holding together the widely-separated parts of the 
Church by a common bond, and being as jealous 
against schism as the Israelites were when they 
went posting to Shiloh to demand of the trans- 
Jordanic tribes an explanation of the altar of wit- 
ness, the Assembly adopted a circular letter "urging 
in the most earnest manner the respective synods to 
take effectual measures that all the presbyteries send 
up in due season their full representation," so that 
the scattered tribes of this Israel might, through 
their representatives, appear together once a year 
before the Lord at the sanctuary. Nor was the de- 
plorable and pitiable condition of the frontiers for- 
gotten or neglected, but received, as it deserved, 
most earnest and solemn attention. On a report of 
Drs. Allison and Stanhope Smith, the synods were 
requested to recommend to the General Assembly 
at their next meeting, two members, well qualified, 
to be employed in missions on our frontiers, for 
the purpose of organizing churches, administering 
ordinances, ordaining elders, collecting information 
concerning the religious state of these parts, and 
proposing the best means of establishing a gospel 
ministry among the people; and in order to provide 
necessary funds the presbyteries were enjoined to 
have collections made and forwarded with all con- 
venient speed. This action was in full accord with 



TO THE REUNION 155 

an unbroken line of deliverances stretching back to 
the very beginning of organic Presbyterianism in 
this country. The Church of our fathers was poor 
of purse, but rich in faith; and though "little 
among the thousands of Judah," she had a heart 
big enough to take in the world. From the first she 
has been a missionary Church. Woe be unto her 
if she lose that spirit! 

Desirous, moreover, to spread the knowledge of 
eternal life contained in the Holy Scriptures, the 
Assembly adopted measures by which to aid the 
publication and dissemination of an American 
edition of the Bible, thus indicating the genuineness 
of their Protestantism by their love for and attach- 
ment to the word of God pure and simple. 

Adam Rankin, from the Presbytery of Transyl- 
vania, who, like the thief in the gospel, seems not 
to have " entered by the door," but to have climbed 
up some other way, brought before the Assembly a 
portentous overture to the effect that the Church 
had fallen into a "great and pernicious error in the 
public worship of God by disusing Rouse's versifi- 
cation of David's Psalms and adopting, in the room 
of it, Watts' imitation." Mr. Rankin being heard 
patiently "as long as he chose to speak," which 
was at "great length," an able and judicious com- 
mittee was appointed to confer with him privately; 
but efforts toward relieving his mind proving futile, 



156 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

he was earnestly "recommended to exercise that 
Christian charity toward those who differed from 
him in their views on this matter which was exer- 
cised toward himself, and he was guarded to be 
careful not to disturb the peace of the Church on 
this head." These reasonable and fraternal recom- 
mendations were disregarded by him, however; and 
returning home, by a fierce and fanatical agitation 
of the subject, he produced in the Church in Ken- 
tucky a schism which for years entailed lamentable 
disaster upon the cause of Christ in that State. The 
temper and action of the Assembly in the premises 
show that the policy of the Church on the question 
of psalmody was settled. 

In answer to an overture as to whether the 
"General Assembly would admit to their commun- 
ion a presbytery who are totally averse to the doc- 
trine of receiving, hearing or judging of any appeals 
from presbyteries to synods or from synods to 
General Assemblies, because in their judgment it is 
inconsistent with Scripture and the practice of the 
primitive Church," it was said "that although they 
consider the right of appeal from the decision of an 
inferior judicature to a superior one an important 
privilege, which no member of their body ought to 
be deprived of, yet they at the same time declare 
that they do not desire any member to be active in 
any case which may be inconsistent with the 



TO THE REUNION 157 

dictates of his conscience." This does not prove 
or argue that the Assembly, which was almost en- 
tirely composed of Scotchmen and Irishmen or those 
of Scotch-Irish extraction, held or sympathized with 
lax ecclesiastical views, but it only shows that in 
peculiar and delicate circumstances the Assembly 
acted cautiously, prudently and charitably. It 
would have been marvelously strange if, after all 
her testimony and all her sufferings in defense of 
her principles, the Church should at this point have 
tamely repudiated these principles. The very calm- 
ness and mildness of the answer rather show the 
firmness of her convictions and the strength of her 
position. 

The Church at this time consisted of four synods, 
sixteen presbyteries, one hundred and seventeen 
ministers and four hundred and nineteen churches, 
two hundred and four of which were vacant. 
Single presbyteries embraced whole States and in- 
definite expanses of territories besides. Pastors had 
parishes as large as England, Scotland and Ireland 
all put together. 

The shock of the French revolution was felt on 
these shores. Infidelity in France, in the name of 
liberty, equality and fraternity, had committed 
atrocities for which human speech has coined no 
fitting or adequate terms. In its wanton, blas- 
phemous impiety it had violated all sanctities, it 



158 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

had desecrated all shrines, it had trampled upon all 
rights, human and divine, it had christened the 
dreadest instrument of modern times the " holy 
guillotine," it had striven to quench the light of 
hope in the heart of man by decreeing that " there 
is no God" and that " death is an eternal sleep," it 
had wreaked its direst vengeance on the living, and 
then, hyena-like, had rifled the grave that it might 
dishonor the bones and dust of the illustrious dead. 
It has left its track on the page of history as the 
trail of a filthy snake, in orgies of lust and in car- 
nivals of blood. The mephitic atmosphere of its 
licentious and ribald atheism was wafted across the 
ocean, and threatened to blight with a curse the 
virgin life of the young republic. If the principles 
of French infidelity had fairly taken root in Ameri- 
can soil, they would have produced a harvest of 
anarchy, lust and carnage such as they had pro- 
duced in their native soil; and for some time after 
the Revolutionary War it seemed that such a catas- 
trophe as this awaited the nation. 

During the war France was our ally, and thus the 
sympathy between the two countries was close and 
responsive. French fashions, French manners and 
French modes of thought and of living dazzled the 
minds of many. Some of the leading statesmen of 
the time and many of the lower politicians were 
avowed infidels. French infidelity was discussed 



TO THE REUNION 159 

around the camp-fires, in legislative halls, in social 
circles, at the Federal capital and in the backwoods 
of remote Western settlements. War, too, had 
left its dregs and debris of vice, idleness, drunken- 
ness and debauchery. The very air was heavy 
with the poison of deadly error, and the Church 
itself felt its paralyzing influence. Formalism, in- 
difference and skepticism prevailed among profess- 
ing Christians, while many of the pastors were 
mere '* hirelings who cared not for the sheep." 
The foundations of religion, morality and of social 
order seemed to be giving way. In view of this 
state of things, the General Assembly, in the year 
1798, issued a pastoral letter which to this day 
sounds like the blast of a trumpet. The letter 
speaks eloquently and solemnly of the "con- 
vulsions in Europe" and of the "solemn crisis" 
in this country; it points with alarm to the " burst- 
ing storm which threatened to sweep before it the 
religious principles, institutions and morals of the 
people;" it frames a dreadful indictment against 
the age, charging it with corruption of manners, 
prevailing impiety, horrible profanation of the 
Lord's Day, contempt for religion, abounding infi- 
delity, which assumes a front of daring impiety 
and possesses a mouth filled with blasphemy; and 
it declares that among ministers of the gospel and 
professors of Christianity there was a degree of 



160 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

supineness, inattention, formality, deadness, hypoc- 
risy and pernicious error which threatened the 
dissolution of religious society. A dark picture, 
truly, but not a whit darker than the subject which 
it portrayed. 

Nor were such views and forebodings confined 
to the clergymen. Patrick Henry, in a letter to 
his daughter, says, "The view which the rising 
greatness of our country presents to my eyes is 
greatly tarnished by the general prevalence of 
deism, which, with me, is but another name for 
vice and depravity." 

The clouds which thus lowered over the new 
States and threw their black shadows of evil por- 
tent far into the future were scattered by the breath 
of the Spirit of God going forth in powerful and 
widespread revivals of religion. During the Revo- 
lutionary War, on the borders of Western Pennsyl- 
vania, in a rude fort into which had been driven the 
scattered families of a sparse neighborhood, and in 
which they were held besieged by bloody savages, 
through the modest, earnest conversations of one 
layman, the mighty work began which forever 
settled on these shores the issue as between the 
gospel and French infidelity. It was " an handful 
of corn in the earth," in a strange seed-plot, but the 
fruit thereof to-day. in all these States, and far 
hence to the Gentiles, " shakes like Lebanon." "It 



TO THE REUNION 161 

is the Lord's doings, and it is wondrous in our 
eyes." From the year 1781 to the year 1787 there 
was almost a continuous effusion of the Holy Ghost 
in marvelous power upon the churches in Western 
Pennsylvania. Souls were drawn as by an irre- 
sistible magnet to the pulpit, and held for days 
and nights under the power of the truth in its 
enlightening and saving efficacy. To measure 
the results of such a work at such a time, in a 
society which was in a formative state, is as 
impossible as it would be to estimate the contents 
of the covenanted blessings of Abraham. From 
that rude fort " their line is gone out through all 
the earth." 

When the work had gone on for five years in 
Western Pennsylvania, there might have been 
found across the Blue Ridge, one Saturday after- 
noon, in a dense forest, a mile from Hampden- 
Sidney College, four young students holding a 
prayer meeting. For the first time in their lives 
they opened their lips in praver in the presence of 
any except their God. Hidden in the deep recesses 
of the w r oods, they stammered forth their broken 
petitions, but no prayers uttered beneath the domes 
of grand cathedrals and in the presence of thou- 
sands of rapt worshipers were ever more efficacious. 
The next meeting of these students was appointed 
in one of their rooms in the college, and behind 



162 FR03I ADOPTION F0E31 OF GOVERNMENT 

bolted doors and in suppressed voices they began to 
sing and pray; but the news of the strange pro- 
ceeding spread rapidly through the college, and 
soon a mob was collected at the door of the room, 
whooping, thumping, swearing and threatening 
vengeance; nor was the riot quelled until two of 
the professors appeared upon the scene and vigor- 
ously exercised their official authority. A prayer 
meeting raised a riot in Hamp den-Sidney College! 
If we take into account the additional fact that out- 
side of this little praying circle there was not a copy 
of the Bible among the students, we can form an 
idea of the degree to which the leaven of infidelity 
had infected the minds of the young men of that 
generation. From that little prayer meeting in the 
woods began a precious work of grace which 
spread through the counties south of the James 
River and swept up and down the great valley of 
Virginia, baptizing in its course the two literary in- 
stitutions, Hampden-Sidney College and Liberty 
Hall Academy, which afterwards became Washing- 
ton College, and giving to the ministry such men as 
Drury Lacy, with "the silver voice and the silver 
hand," William Hill, Carey Allen, Nash Legrand, 
James Blythe, John Lyle, James Turner and Archi- 
bald Alexander. Thus the proud, vaunting specu- 
lations and blasphemous scoffings and swollen in- 
solences of infidelity were silenced in Virginia by 



TO THE REUNION 163 

the power of the Holy Ghost exhibited in the con- 
version of souls. 

Sucn power as this was not pent up within State 
lines. The venerable Patillo came up from North 
Carolina to see the wonderful works of God, and 
returning home with mind and heart aglow finished 
his ministry in a blaze of religious fervor. A young 
man who years before had left North Carolina in 
order to seek an education in Western Pennsyl- 
vania, and who in the meantime had been converted 
under the preaching of the Rev. Joseph Smith, and 
who was among the first of those who were edu- 
cated under Dr. McMillan, having been licensed 
by the Presbytery of Redstone, started southward 
to visit his kindred, and on the way stopped at 
Prince Edward and caught the holy contagion of 
the revival there, was the means under God of 
arousing the churches from a deathlike stupor and 
of diffusing the spiritual awakening from the Dan 
to the Catawba. With intense convictions, a fear- 
less and merciless reprover of sin, a pitiless scourger 
of formality and hypocrisy, with an impassioned 
manner and a voice like seven trumpets, the Rev. 
James McGre-ady flashed the terrors of the law into 
the minds and hearts of men until the stoutest 
quailed. After some years of most arduous and 
fruitful labor in North Carolina he removed to Ken- 
tucky, where his searching, discriminating preach- 



164 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

ing became the means of the great awakening in 
that State, the mighty influence of which, in a ref- 
luent tide, swept over Tennessee, the Carolinas, 
Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. 

The revival in Virginia and North Carolina had 
brought into the ministry a band of young men 
whose hearts God had touched in a signal man- 
ner. Never was a knight of the cross more eager 
to encounter hardship and peril in the rescue of 
the Holy Sepulchre from the hand of the infidel 
than were these young soldiers of the Lord Jesus 
eager in their flaming zeal to engage in arduous 
and perilous enterprises for the glory of their 
Master. In order to furnish them a suitable field, 
the Synod of Virginia, in the year 1789, organized 
a committee on missions, which from year to year 
sent forth these young heralds to carry the gospel 
to destitute places. Among these went forth such 
men as Nash Legrand, an Apollo in physical grace 
and proportion, with a voice whose modulations 
were as pleasing as the dulcet notes of a lute, and 
"whose labors were more extensive in spreading 
the revival than any other agent employed in the 
work;" William Hill, one of the immortal four 
who held the prayer meeting in the woods at 
Prince Edward; the eccentric, witty, brilliant, 
genial and eloquent Carey Allen, " whom the com- 
mon people heard gladly," and whose intense ardor 



TO THE REUNION 165 

soon consumed his physical life; Robert Marshall, 
who, spared through six hard-fought battles of the 
Revolutionary War to become a soldier in a holier 
war, enlisted all the enthusiasm of his impulsive 
nature in the work of preaching the gospel with 
earnestness and startling directness; Archibald 
Alexander, whom to name is to eulogize; William 
Calhoun, the companion of Carey Allen in his mis- 
sionary toils and perils; the brilliant, able and 
scholarly John Poage Campbell (a lineal descendant 
of the seraphic Rutherford), whose sledge hammer 
logic dashed to pieces the Pelagianism of Craig- 
head, and who wielded a pen which was at one 
time as keen as a Damascus blade and at another as 
terrific and crushing as the battle-ax of a mailed 
knight; the praying Rannels; James Blythe, whose 
room had been the rendezvous of the praying 
students at Hampden-Sidney College; and Robert 
Stuart, the laborious missionary, the accomplished 
educator, the faithful pastor, a Melanchthon in 
council, but a Luther in battle. Of this number 
some labored in Virginia and some went to Ken- 
tucky. These were the young guard of Presbyte- 
rianism, who, snatching up the drooping standards 
of the sacramental host, with a holy chivalry bore 
them onward through teeming dangers and sore 
privations, to plant them firmly and conspicuously 
on outpost and picket line. These were the youth- 



166 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

ful heroes whose clarion voices, tuned to the love 
of Jesus, called the Church from out her entrench- 
ments, in which she had for long been cowering, 
and made her aggressive in her whole mien, atti- 
tude and spirit, and led her forward to victories 
which rendered the spiritual opening of the nine- 
teenth century as bright as "another morn risen on 
mid-noon." 

The last century drew to its close amidst dense 
spiritual darkness in Kentucky. The rapid increase 
of population had far outstripped the supply of 
ministers and the multiplication of the means of 
grace. The labors of Father Rice and a few men 
of kindred spirit were wholly inadequate to meet 
the demands of the times. Amidst the contagious 
spirit of land speculation and the exciting scenes 
and incidents of border life, many who at their 
former homes had been exemplary Christians forgot 
their vows, struck their colors and went over to the 
ranks of the enemy, while those who, although not 
professors, had been respecters of religion, became 
open scoffers, and open scoffers grew more and 
more bold in iniquity. Mammon, rum and mad 
adventure ruled the hearts of men with despotic 
sway. Infidelity, vice and irreligion came in like a 
flood, wave on wave, threatening to overwhelm 
and sweep away the foundations of all social, civil 
and ecclesiastical institutions. " The people sat in 



TO THE REUNION 167 

the region and shadow of death" In the perilous 
crisis many of the ministers of the gospel grew 
faint-hearted, and through cowardice or apostasy 
betrayed the cause which they were sworn to de- 
fend. A stiff and stark formalism, and the un- 
happy controversy and schism on the subject of 
psalmody, had well-nigh destroyed all piety in the 
Church, while in the walks of public life infidelity 
prevailed and among the masses abominable and 
high-handed crime abounded. 

Such was the desperate condition of things in 
Kentucky when the young missionaries from Vir- 
ginia and North Carolina entered it and began to 
preach the gospel with such a fullness of conviction 
and with so awful vividness that all classes of men, 
from the philosophic skeptic to the red-handed 
desperado, were swayed by its power as the fields 
of headed grain bend before the sweep of the wind 
or as clouds marshal to the step of the storm. 

The revival began in the year 1797 in the churches 
which were under the pastoral care of the Rev. 
James McGready, who preached the most vital and 
solemn doctrines of the gospel with prodigious force 
and startling directness. The religious interest thus 
begun extended and deepened until, in the year 
1800, on sacramental occasions, thousands came 
from far and near, bringing with them provisions 
and conveniences for temporary lodging. This was 



168 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

the origin of camp meetings; and when once in- 
augurated, they became a distinctive feature of the 
times and constituted a marked agency of the work 
as it was carried on. When the camp was estab- 
lished, it became, for the time being, the center of 
all life and interest. The plow rusted in the fur- 
row, the sickle was hung up even in the time of 
harvest; all ages and all classes swelled the crowds 
which poured in from all sides, as the tribes of 
Israel converged by all paths to the tabernacle. 
Thousands of vehicles, with their thousands of 
neighboring horses, filled the groves and gave the 
appearance of an army encamped. Men, women 
and children, old age with its staff, the child with 
its rattle, the invalid with his bed, the matron with 
her cares, the maiden in the freshness of her beauty, 
the young man in the glory of his strength, were 
there by tens of thousands. 

From the moving, teeming multitudes the hum of 
voices arose like the distant roar of the sea. Now 
the volume of praise arises as the " voice of many 
waters," and now all is hushed except the impas- 
sioned tones of the preacher, which, magnetized by 
the burden of the message and by intensity of emo- 
tion, kindle to a flame the hearts of the breathless 
throng as when the wind drives to race-horse speed 
the leaping flames on a dry prairie. The spectacle 
at night, with the scattered tents and wagons, and 



TO THE RE UNI OX 169 

the multitudes of men, women and children and 
horses, all dimly revealed by camp-fires, torches, 
lamps and candles, and the deep, dark, silent forest 
around, made up a scene fit for a Raphael to picture 
in colors or for a Milton to paint in words. Amidst 
scenes and incidents so wild and strange and im- 
pressive, with so many inflammable elements com- 
mingling and with so many intense influences and 
forces cooperating to produce the deepest convic- 
tion of sin on the one hand and to excite the most 
ecstatic devotion on the other, it need not be a mat- 
ter of astonishment that lamentable extravagances 
both of sentiment and of conduct were developed; 
but these extravagances formed no essential part of 
the revival, and are to be carefully discriminated 
from it. Some of the ablest and wisest pastors 
who were engaged in the work solemnly protested 
against the "bodily exercises" and all their un- 
seemly concomitants. The Lord sent a gracious 
revival, but through the folly and vanity of man it 
was marred and disfigured by abominable excres- 
cences; or, in the language of the venerable Father 
Rice, " it was sadly mismanaged, dashed down and 
broken to pieces," so that the work which began 
under auspices so bright ended in disastrous fanati- 
cism, heresy and schism. When the Spirit of God 
moved the waters which had been so long stag- 
nant, profuse froth and scum were thrown to the 



170 FR031 ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

surface in the form of New Lightism, Universalism, 
Arianism and fanaticism. 

The New Light schism in its brief and fitful 
career swept up the cast-off skins of errors, new 
and old, as they lay strewn along the track of time 
all the way from Gnosticism to Shakerism, and was 
at last merged into that creedless Babel of theolog- 
ical opinions founded by Alexander Campbell. 

The widespread religious interest created a de- 
mand for ministers of the gospel, and at the same 
time begat a desire to preach the gospel in the 
minds of many who had no academical or other 
training to fit them for the sacred office. The li- 
censing and ordaining such men, in utter and high- 
handed defiance of the requirements of the Book of 
Discipline, both in regard to literary qualifications 
and to the adoption and subscription of the Con- 
fession of Faith, led to the schism which resulted in 
the organization of the Cumberland Presbyterian 
Church. 

From these conflicts the Church emerged greatly 
reduced in numbers and resources, it is true, but, 
nevertheless, purer and more compact than before. 
Amidst the fierce storms she preserved her stand- 
ards intact, vindicated the cause of theological edu- 
cation, resolutely refused to abate an iota of the 
conditions of subscription of the Confession, and 
demonstrated to all the world that in times of high- 



TO THE REUNION 171 

wrought excitement it is safer to stand on the rock 
of principle than to drift with the eddying currents 
of expediency. 

Notwithstanding these deplorable fanaticisms, 
apostasies and lamentable schisms, there was a 
genuine and extensive work of grace throughout 
the churches in Kentucky and Tennessee. The 
bodily exercises were no part of the work of the 
Holy Ghost. The revival was a work of God 
notwithstanding the bodily exercises. In the pro- 
longed and intense excitement the infirmities of 
human nature threw to the surface a great many ir- 
regularities and extraordinary physical phenomena 
which, to a degree, obscured the real work in its 
progress and results. The winnowed wheat glides 
quietly into the garner, while the chaff and mildew 
darken and pollute the air. 

In the second year of the present century the re- 
vival began at Cross Roads, in Orange County, 
North Carolina, and from that center radiated its 
spiritual quickening light and power through a wide 
circle. Such was the interest in hearing the gospel 
from the living teacher that thousands, in the depth 
of winter, stood listening the livelong day in 
drenching storms of rain, sleet and snow. Meet- 
ings were continued through the whole night to the 
breaking of the day, and then were resumed at nine 
o'clock on the next morning. The infidel, the 



172 FR03I ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

scoffer, the formal professor, the drunkard, the de- 
bauchee, the giddy youth, the hardened criminal, 
the learned, the ignorant, the bond, the free, the 
master, the slave, were all brought under the resist- 
less influence and were made one in Christ Jesus. 
No barriers erected by Satan were sufficient to 
arrest the progress of the work; but purged to a 
great extent of the extravagances and excrescences 
which had been so prolific of mischief in Kentucky, 
it gained thereby in depth and power, and has left 
in the Carolinas spots as marked in the memory, 
and as dear to the hearts, of Presbyterians, as the 
moors and mountains of Scotland are sacred in the 
eyes of the Covenanters. 

In Virginia the revival began in a little prayer 
meeting of private Christians among the mountains 
where there was no stated ministry — another in- 
stance of proof that genuine revivals are not pro- 
duced by blowing trumpets or by the impressive 
marshaling of great crowds. Now, as ever, the 
Lord is not in the storm nor the earthquake nor the 
fire, but in the "still small voice. " The more 
quietly and obscurely a revival begins, the greater 
is its real power. The influence of that little band 
of praying disciples among the mountains, not one 
of whom probably could construct a half dozen con- 
secutive sentences of good English, rose like the 
little cloud which the servant of Elijah saw from 



TO THE REUNION 173 

the top of Carmel, and descended in copious show- 
ers of blessing throughout the State for many 
years thereafter. 

In the autumn of the year 1802 there were mar- 
velous displays of divine grace in the pastoral 
charge of the Rev. Elisha McCurdy, consisting of 
the churches of Three Springs and Cross Roads in 
Western Pennsylvania, in which churches a pray- 
ing band had for some time before been observing 
a concert of prayer on each Thursday evening at 
sunset. The gracious influences thus kindled soon 
spread to the congregations of Cross Creek, Rac- 
coon, Upper Buffalo and Chartiers, whose pastors 
were respectively the Rev. Thomas Marquis, the 
Rev. Joseph Patterson, the Rev. John Anderson and 
the Rev. John McMillan. The interest and power 
of this revival culminated at the "great Buffalo 
sacrament," in November, 1802, at Upper Buffalo, 
Washington County, Pennsylvania. Vast crowds 
attended this meeting, and religious services were 
continued almost without interruption from Satur- 
day noon to Tuesday evening, and all these exercises 
were accompanied with marvelous displays of divine 
power. During the progress of this meeting the 
Rev. Elisha McCurdy preached his celebrated "war 
sermon," under the power of which, according to 
eye-witnesses, it seemed that every tenth man had 
been smitten down. Rarely in the history of the 



174 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

Church have such ministers labored together in a re- 
vival as met in this one — Patterson, "full of faith 
and the Holy Ghost," Marquis of the silver tongue, 
Anderson, whose searching discourses penetrated 
the hidden places of the human heart as a surgeon's 
probe goes to the bottom of a festering wound, and 
the lion-like McMillan, whose thunderous tones in 
preaching the terrors of the law made sinners feel 
that the trumpet of the archangel was sounding. 
Under the preaching of such men began the won- 
derful work of grace which in its progress reached 
and blessed " every Presbyterian congregation west 
of the mountains in Pennsylvania." 

Nor were these outpourings of the spirit confined 
to the South and the West. In the eastern part of 
the Church the revival influence was not so mighty 
nor so extraordinary in its phenomena, yet it was 
no less genuine or precious or far-reaching in its 
influence and results. In the year 1802 a deep and 
continued work of grace began in the First Church 
of Newark, New Jersey, which was then under the 
collegiate pastorate of Dr. Alexander McWhorter 
and the Rev. Edward Dorr Griffin. The ministry 
of Dr. McWhorter had been a series of revivals, and 
the history of this ministry had a brilliant continu- 
ation under Dr. Griffin, a physical and intellectual 
giant, whose splendid endowments were conse- 
crated without reserve to the service of his Lord 



TO THE REUNION 175 

and Master; and whether preaching in a metro- 
politan pulpit or in a schoolhouse or in a cramped 
and dingy townhall, these endowments were all 
brought into play with all their overpowering efful- 
gence. His wonderful endowments both of body 
and of mind, his majestic presence and his magnifi- 
cent oratory, place him conspicuously in the front 
rank of the preachers of all the ages ; and a revival of 
religion was the occasion on which he seemed to be 
most at home and on which his faculties worked 
most harmoniously and most brilliantly. 

While in commanding ability and Demosthenic 
eloquence Dr. Griffin was without a peer, there were 
colaborers of his who were not a whit behind him 
in devotion and in influence. Such were the Rev. 
Henry Kollock, upon whom the mantle of White- 
field seems to have fallen, Dr. James Richards, after- 
wards the successor of Dr. Griffin in the First Church 
of Newark, New Jersey, the Rev. Asa Hillyer, 
whose every instinct was evangelistic, and whose 
thoughts and prayers accompanied his gifts to the 
ends of the earth, the witty and genial Armstrong 
(Amzi, D. D.), the amiable Perrine (Matthew La 
Rue, D. D.), Robert Finley, "the father of the 
American Colonization Society," who, in his en- 
thusiasm for the cause which he had espoused, 
brought the mightiest minds of the United States 
Senate to sit at his feet. These brethren, quickened 



176 FROM ADOPTION F0E3I OF GOVERNMENT 

by the spirit of revival, went forth two by two 
through the destitute portions of New Jersey, in 
quest of " the lost sheep of the house of Israel," and 
in these missionary tours they were greatly blessed. 
Preaching to the miners among the mountains they 
saw, as Whitefield in England had seen, the tears of 
penitence wash white furrows down the begrimed 
and hardened cheeks of these men. The work w ; as 
quite general throughout the State, and persons of 
all ages and of all ranks and classes were brought to 
Christ. 

From the year 1803 to the year 18 12 the narratives 
on the state of religion which were adopted by the 
successive General Assemblies are almost uniformly 
cheering and inspiring by their intelligence of re- 
vival, of victory over infidelity, which had been so 
much dreaded, of steady, healthful growth and 
increasing aggressive power on the part of the 
Church. One year brings the news that ''there 
was scarcely a presbytery under the care of the 
General Assembly from which some pleasing in- 
telligence had not been announced, and that in 
most of the northern and eastern presbyteries 
revivals of religion of a more or less general nature 
had taken place." In the following year we hear of 
remarkable outpourings of the Spirit of God over 
the "vast region extending from the Ohio River to 
the hikes, which region a few years before had 



TO THE REUNION 177 

been an uninhabited wilderness," as well as in the 
Synods of New Jersey, New York and Albany. 
Then again the glad tidings come up from Long- 
Island, from the banks of the Hudson and from the 
" newly-settled regions in the western parts of the 
State of New York," which desert, under the 
auspices of grace, promised to become as the 
garden of the Lord; and at another time these glad 
tidings came from Philadelphia, Cape May, Balti- 
more and Washington City. From time to time 
the delegates from the Congregational Churches of 
New England brought good news of revivals in 
Connecticut, in Yale College, in Vermont, New 
Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. From the 
Merrimac .to the Mississippi, from Cape Fear 
to Cape Cod, from the Chesapeake to the lakes, 
came year after year tidings of revival, of the con- 
version of sinners, of the discomfiture of infidelity, 
and of the triumphs of grace, which were more 
glorious than any that were ever bulletined by 
martial heroes from Nimrod to Moltke. In all this 
wide circle the General Assembly from its watch- 
tower (i could trace the footsteps of Jehovah," 
could perceive distinctly amidst the tumultuous 
strife the progress of the triumphal chariot of the 
Lord of hosts, and could see the pillar of cloud 
and of fire going before the people as they pen- 
etrated the great Western wilderness. With the 



178 FE03I ADOPTION FOBM OF GOVERNMENT 

smoke of the " clearing" rose the incense of prayer 
and praise. Thus into the foundations of our 
national institutions went the tempered mortar of 
sound theology and of vital godliness. With these 
fathers religion was not a theory or a philosophy, 
but a life. 

The narratives on the state of religion frequently 
and eloquently refer to the conquests of grace over 
infidelity and false philosophy. They tell how these 
opposing forces were by the power of God driven 
from the field, and how their champions were either 
converted or else covered with confusion. They 
also repeatedly rejoice in the fact that the educated 
mind of the nation was turning more and more to 
the cross of Christ. When we remember the 
widespread prevalence of infidelity in the latter part 
of the eighteenth century and the front of brazen- 
faced assurance which it put on, and when we 
think of the persistent and malignant efforts which 
were made to brand Christianity as a vulgar de- 
lusion, utterly unworthy the consideration of an 
intelligent mind, and when we consider how this 
seductive infidelity, under the guise of philosophy 
and respectability, had poisoned the political and 
social life of the nation, — we can understand the 
solicitude of the Church in the solemn crisis, and 
know why it was that she so rejoiced when she 
saw the banner of the cross lifted up and advancing, 



TO THE REUNION 179 

while the standards of the enemy went down amidst 
the panic-stricken ranks of unbelief. 

Thus by the power of the Holy Ghost the gates 
of the new century on this continent were swung 
open. The Sun of righteousness arose, and the 
sentinels, from Plymouth Rock to the peaks of the 
Cumberland Mountains, passed the watchword, 
" The morning cometh" 

The first pulsations of organic Presbyterianism in 
this country were the throbbings of missionary 
zeal. As early as the year 1707 the presbytery 
ordered that " every minister of the presbytery 
supply neighboring desolate places where a min- 
ister is wanting and opportunity of doing good 
offers." The entire ministry of the Church was 
thus organized into a missionary corps. Like the 
children of Issachar, they were "men that had 
understanding of the times to know what Israel 
ought to do." They divined the coming grandeur 
of the empire which, springing up in the forests 
of America, was to stretch "from sea to sea," and 
they recognized clearly and felt profoundly the 
supreme necessity of laying the foundations of this 
empire in the principles of the word of God, so 
that it might be able to withstand the winds and 
floods and earthquake shocks which it must en- 
counter in its march down the centuries. The 



180 FROM ADOPTION FOR3I OF GOVERNMENT 

Church and country greatly needed godly and 
faithful ministers, and also the means by which 
these ministers could be supported. Earnest and 
repeated cries for both men and money were sent 
to England,, Scotland and Ireland, and any favorable 
response to these entreaties awakened the liveliest 
sentiments of gratitude in the hearts of these 
laborious, self-denying servants of God, who, with 
scanty material resources, but with a marvelous 
wealth of faith, were humbly and heroically dis- 
charging the obscure duties which belong to the 
"day of small things." 

At the first meeting of the Synod of Philadelphia 
an overture was adopted to the effect that the 
several members of the synod "contribute some- 
thing to the raising of a fund for pious uses." 
These ministers gave of their poverty, and accord- 
ing to the spirit of the overture, it was only after they 
had thus given, that they might "use their interest 
with their friends on proper occasions to contribute 
something to the same purpose." They did not 
merely inculcate benevolence, "as the manner of 
some is," but gave a practical exemplification of it. 
They not only pointed out the way to their flocks, 
but led them in that way. As I may not traverse 
this part of the field, which has been so thoroughly 
canvassed, let it suffice to say that the. Presbyterian 
Church in this country, from the very first, has been 



TO THE REUNION 181 

in heart and soul, in body and spirit, in life and 
limb, a missionary organization. 

The General Assembly took up and carried for- 
ward the work which had been inaugurated by the 
presbytery and the synod. At its first meeting this 
subject occupied the earnest thought and care of the 
General Assembly, and the synods were enjoined to 
furnish, through the presbyteries, suitable mission- 
aries, and the churches were urged to take collections 
for the cause, that thus both men and means might 
be furnished for the establishment of churches on 
the frontiers. 

In the next year (1790) the Synod of Virginia, 
not having received the official action of the General 
Assembly, organized a very efficient "Commission 
of Synod," which sent its missionaries from the 
" bay shore to the Mississippi." I have in another 
connection spoken of the Commission of the Synod 
of Virginia, of the remarkable band of missionaries 
which that Commission sent forth, and of the great 
work which these missionaries accomplished within 
the borders of Virginia and in Kentucky and Ten- 
nessee. The Synod of North Carolina also inaugu- 
rated measures of its own for advancing the picket 
line along the extensive frontier. These synods 
were to report their operations to the General 
Assembly. 

By these different agencies and from these 



182 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

different centers the aggressive work of the Church 
was pushed vigorously forward. The missionaries 
were itinerant, traveling over fields immense in 
extent and bristling with difficulties and dangers. 
The General Assembly sent its missionaries mainly 
to Central New York, Northern Pennsylvania and 
to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. One circuit ex- 
tended from Lake George to the northwestern fron- 
tier of Pennsylvania. Another stretched from 
Northumberland County along the branches of the 
Susquehanna, and beyond the head waters of that 
river northward to Lake Ontario and westward to 
Lake Erie. At the beginning of the century the 
Synod of North Carolina had sent its missionaries, 
in connection with the missionaries of the General 
Assembly, westward to the Mississippi and south- 
ward well-nigh to the Gulf of Mexico. 

In these aggressive movements of the Church the 
Indians were not forgotten; the work of " gospel- 
izing " them occupied the early and earnest atten- 
tion of the General Assembly. Abundant and 
urgent incentives to such an enterprise were found 
in the condition and necessities of these savage 
tribes, while splendid examples of devotion and 
success in this field were on record as a sanction 
and an encouragement in the undertaking. The 
immortal author of The Treatise on the Will, "the 
greatest divine of the age," had spent the fullest 



TO THE REUNION 183 

and the ripest of his years among the Indians at 
Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and Brainerd, by his 
labors and apostolic zeal among the same people on 
the Delaware and the Susquehanna, had given to 
Christendom new ideas on the subject of missionary 
consecration and enthusiasm, and on the power of 
the gospel as a saving and civilizing agent among 
the lowest and most degraded classes. Under the 
power of such incentives, and in the light of these 
great examples, the gospel was preached to the 
Indians along the frontier from the Hudson to the 
Mississippi. Our forefathers, with their trusty rifles 
as a defense in the one hand, held. out with the 
other the Bread of Life and the blessings of civiliza- 
tion and education to their treacherous and bloody 
foes. The dreadful war whoop was answered by 
the trumpet of the gospel of peace. The Church 
kept bravely abreast of the line of population as it 
advanced westward. The watchman of Zion, 
seeing the standards of the sacramental host borne 
steadily onward over mountains, across rivers, 
through difficult and perilous places, and planted 
amidst the log cabins of the frontiersmen and the 
wigwams of the Indians from the St. Lawrence to 
the Gulf of Mexico, could have taken up the shout 
of the mediaeval poet: 

" The royal banners forward go, 
The cross shines forth with mystic glow." 



184 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

Presbyterianism has always been the patron and 
promoter of learning. An open Bible, an enlight- 
ened intellect and an unfettered conscience have 
ever been her watchwords. Whithersoever she has 
gone she has borne the torch of learning along 
with her. Her goings forth have been attended by 
an illumination like to that which attended the steps 
of Milton's Raphael in Eden. The pioneers of Amer- 
ican Presbyterianism, true to the traditions of the 
past, carried the lamp of learning with them into 
the wilderness. Under the bare and rude rafters of 
log cabins they held converse with the mighty 
spirits of Greece and Rome, and within sound of 
the Indian war whoop and within sight of the 
council-fires of savage tribes they laid the founda- 
tions of literary institutions whose influence has 
had a wider reach and a deeper current than ever 
belonged to the doctrines of the porch or the 
academy. 

The log college of Tennent on the banks of the 
Neshaminy first gave the distinctive stamp to Amer- 
ican Presbyterianism, and that of Blair at Fagg's 
Manor, (Pa.), was scarcely less influential, and shall 
ever have a secure place in its unique historic niche 
so long as it can be said, "Samuel Davies was edu- 
cated here and went forth into the world an expo- 
nent and exemplar of his Alma Mater;" while that 
of Finley at Nottingham, Md., sent forth such men 



TO THE REUNION 185 

as Dr. Waddell, the immortal blind preacher, whose 
eloquence William Wirt has made familiar to every 
schoolboy. 

In Western Pennsylvania, as early as 1782, the 
Rev. Thaddeus Dodd opened his log academy on 
Ten Mile Creek; the Rev. Joseph Smith, at Upper 
Buffalo, appropriating his kitchen for the purpose 
of a Latin school, gave it the dignified and classical 
title, "The Study"; while even earlier than this 
Dr. McMillan, on the banks of the Chartiers, laid 
the foundations of Jefferson College. 

The same policy was pursued in North Carolina. 
The self-educated Patillo taught a classical school 
at Granville; Dr. Hall had his famous "Clio's 
Nursery" at Snow Creek, and his "Academy of 
the Sciences," with its philosophical apparatus, at 
his own house; the flaming evangelist McGready 
opened a school at his house; Wallis had a classical 
school at New Providence, McCorkle at Salisbury, 
and McCaule at Centre. Patillo and Hall not only 
taught, but wrote text-books. The spirit of these 
men is indicated by an incident in the life of Patillo. 
Once, in his absence from home, his house was 
burned; and the first question on meeting his wife 
was, " My dear, are my books safe? ' 

Down the beautiful valleys of the Holston and 
the Clinch, in Tennessee, emigration poured from 
North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New 



186 FR03I ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

Jersey. The first settled minister in this region was 
the Rev. Samuel Doak, who built a log college, 
which in 1788 was incorporated as Martin Academy, 
the first literary institution established in the valley 
of the Mississippi, and which afterwards, in 1795, 
became Washington College. Subsequently remov- 
ing to Greene County, Mr. Doak opened his " Tus- 
culum," an academy to prepare young men for col- 
lege. This institution also developed into a college. 
A small library procured for Washington College 
in Philadelphia was carried to Tennessee in sacks on 
pack horses. In five years after the first settlement 
of the State by Daniel Boone steps were taken toward 
the founding of a seminary of learning in Kentucky. 
The originators and promoters of this scheme were 
Presbyterians, and the school, the first in Kentucky, 
was opened in the house of Father Rice. 

Presbyterianism is an Aaron's rod which always 
buds with intellectual as well as with spiritual life. 
The Graces and the Muses, in chaste and modest 
fellowship with Christian virtues, dwelt in the 
Western forests. Beside the fires on the altars of 
pure religion burned the lamp of sound learning. 
"The church, the schoolhouse and the college 
grew up with the log cabin, and the principles of 
religion were proclaimed and the classics taught 
where glass windows were unknown and books 
were carried on pack horses." 



TO THE REUNION 187 

Devotion to freedom, profound conviction of 
duty, staunch and unswerving loyalty to truth, 
stern adherence to principle, Catholic charity, an 
active benevolence, love of learning, the spirit of 
missions and the power of revival, — these were the 
vital forces of early American Presbyterianism; and 
these forces had as the theater of their operation 
the republic of the United States, with its vast and 
unsolved problems and its untold possibilities of 
wealth and power, whilst as the epoch of their 
development these forces had the nineteenth cen- 
tury, with its teeming enterprises, its concentrating 
energies, its momentous conflicts and issues. 

Having thus endeavored to set before you clearly, 
in its distinctive characteristics, the Presbyterian 
Church of America during the last decade of the 
eighteenth century and the first decade of the nine- 
teenth century, and having endeavored to place the 
Church fairly abreast of the mighty current of 
modern history, the rest of my task must be dis- 
patched more summarily. In the execution of it I 
shall give only broad outlines and shall deal with 
forces rather than with facts., 

The work of revival, the power of which had 
been felt from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi, 
had evoked the spirit of missions, and the spirit of 
missions had enlarged the views and broadened the 



188 FE03I ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

sympathies of Christians and of churches, and in 
this way different denominations had been brought 
together in friendly cooperation. In the year 1802 
the General Assembly adopted the Plan of Union, 
under which a Presbyterian church might have a 
Congregational pastor or a Congregational church 
might have a Presbyterian pastor, these pastors re- 
taining their respective ecclesiastical relations. The 
motives which prompted this action were in the 
highest degree laudable and honorable, but the 
practical operation of the plan was beset with dif- 
ficulties, and these difficulties soon began to manifest 
themselves. Swift currents were now sweeping 
the Church out into untried waters. New elements, 
new forces and new issues entered into the history 
year by year. The incidents of the drama thicken. 
Events hasten; the tide of mingling peoples rolls 
westward; the steps of divine Providence will not 
tarry; States in the South and in the West rise as 
by magic; along new lines of trade and travel cities 
spring up in a night; vast and important mission- 
fields are rapidly opening, and the Church has 
neither the men nor the means with which to 
occupy these fields. 

In the year 1806 the late Dr. James Hoge, of 
Columbus, Ohio, was sent as a missionary to " the 
State of Ohio and parts adjacent." 

As the new age, with its tumultuous and min- 



TO THE REUNION 189 

giing elements and its pressing demands on Christian 
activity, hurried on, it developed difference of views 
and of policy where unanimity of both had pre- 
vailed before. In pushing forward the cause of 
evangelization there were two antagonistic theories 
according to which the work was conducted. One 
theory multiplied voluntary and irresponsible so- 
cieties in different localities, and operated from 
various centers without unity of purpose or of gov- 
ernment. The other theory strove to unify the 
benevolent work of the Church and to bring it 
within the metes and bounds of ecclesiastical con- 
trol. In the slow but steady working out of this 
latter theory the committee on missions, which was 
raised by the General Assembly in 1790, became a 
stated committee, the stated committee became a 
standing committee, and the standing committee 
passed into the Board of Missions in the year 1816. 
In the same way successive efforts in behalf of 
ministerial education resulted at last in the Board of 
Education in the year 1819. 

Besides these antagonistic views and policies in 
respect to the benevolent work of the Church, ques- 
tions arose under the operation of the Plan of 
Union which touched the vital principles of Presby- 
terianism. There was no dispute as to what Pres- 
byterianism was, but as to how far its fundamental 
principles might be ignored or suspended for the sake 



190 FR03I ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

of expediency. These questions and the differences 
which arose out of them became more and more 
emphasized each succeeding year. By some the Plan 
of Union was put above the constitution of the 
Church. By others the Plan of Union was regarded 
as a masterly device for congregationalizing the 
Church, or else for destroying both Presbyterianism 
and Congregationalism and producing a hybrid mon- 
strosity of ecclesiasticism which would be a carica- 
ture of both. The differences were deep, striking 
down to the roots of the Presbyterian system, and 
were consequently irreconcilable. 

In addition to the differences in regard to policy 
and polity, there were deeper doctrinal contro- 
versies. The cloud which contained this storm 
came from New England. New measures and 
New Haven theology created a great amount of 
distrust and disturbance throughout the Church. 
The very sincerity, earnestness and honesty of the 
men who were engaged on both sides of the con- 
troversy made the contest all the more determined 
and the excitement attending it all the more in- 
tense. Each succeeding year, with its discussions, 
conventions and trials for heresy, widened the lines 
of divergence and whetted the points of antago- 
nism. With much of heroic devotion to principle 
as well as with much of mingled human infirmity 
and error on both sides, the contest waxed hotter 



TO THE REUNION 191 

and hotter, until it reached its culmination in the 
exscinding acts of 1837 and the division of 1838. 

Of late years it has become quite the style to 
speak in a tone of deprecating pity of these ec- 
clesiastical battles of forty years ago, as though 
they were mere quibbles about words or disputes 
about the tithing of the mint and the anise and the 
cummin, and to quote them as proofs of a very low 
state of piety and of the prevalence of a rabid spirit 
of scholasticism and of dead orthodoxy; but it be- 
comes us to beware lest we fall into the con- 
demnation of those who, "measuring themselves 
by themselves and comparing themselves among 
themselves, are not wise." Deep and strong con- 
victions of truth and of duty, and a firm adherence 
to these convictions at any cost, can never be a just 
cause of reproach to Christian men. For such con- 
victions believers in all ages have been "tortured, 
not accepting deliverance," and have counted their 
blood as cheap as water when shed in such a cause. 
They "contend earnestly for the faith" because 
that faith is infinitely precious to them. A Church 
or a Christian without sharp and distinctive beliefs 
is a body without a spinal column, bones or mar- 
row. If ever the time come when men shall not 
care to defend what they hold as Presbyterians or 
Methodists or Baptists or Congregationalists, the 
time will have come when men will not care to 



192 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

defend the truth of the gospel at all. If to be a 
Presbyterian makes a man any the less a Christian 
in any sense or in any particular, then let us burn 
our Confession of Faith and our Book of Govern- 
ment, let us tear down and tear up the banner 
which was carried by our forefathers through so 
many persecutions. But if Presbyterianism is 
scriptural in theory and holy in its practical results, 
then let us never be afraid or ashamed to avow it. 
A Church without a creed is to one which has a 
creed as the hyssop on the wall is to the cedar of 
Lebanon or as the jellyfish is to the Nemean lion. 
The danger is not that we shall hold these doctrines 
too firmly or cherish them too sacredly, but that 
through remissness and indifference we shall let slip 
the precious trusts which have come down to us on 
rivers of martyr blood. 

It is a significant and remarkable fact, and one 
which deserves especial emphasis at our hands, 
that those years of controversy and debate which 
preceded the division of 1837 were years of spiritual 
growth and prosperity in the Church, " the Holy 
Ghost this signifying," that the doctrines of the gos- 
pel are the wisdom of God and the power of God 
unto salvation even when preached in strife and de- 
bate. Better preached thus than not to be preached 
at all. We are not justified in passing judgment on 
these men of '37, some of whom linger amongst us, 



£J 



TO THE REUNION 193 

who, ' firm in the right as God gave them to see 
the right," followed their convictions straight to 
the issue regardless of sacrifices or consequences. 

The division of 1838 was followed by a period 
of tumult, litigation and readjustment. The plow- 
share ran through most of the synods and pres- 
byteries, and through many of the churches even. 
Certain loose elements which were set afloat by 
these riving processes oscillated between the two 
bodies for some time, but at last attached to one or 
the other of them, or else drifted away to other 
spheres of ecclesiastical attraction and affinity. 
When the dust and smoke of the conflict were dis- 
pelled, the view revealed two Presbyterian churches 
with the same Confession of Faith and the same 
Form of Government and the same Book of Dis- 
cipline, working side by side in the same field, yet 
having differences which were quite characteristic 
and distinctive. 

The Old School Church was to a remarkable de- 
gree homogeneous in its constituent elements, and 
was distinguished for a rigid orthodoxy and a strict 
ecclesiasticism. The New School Church, on the 
other hand, was not homogeneous in its constituent 
elements, and was distinguished for a liberal con- 
struction of the standards, and for an ecclesiasti- 
cism which for the sake of the voluntary and co- 
operative system of beneficence put in jeopardy the 



194 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

interests of a just and necessary denominationalism. 
The Old School Church continued in its orbit, in 
possession of its titles, dignities and endowments, 
while the New School Church, against its will, was 
flung off into a new and untried sphere. The Old 
School Church had a well-defined policy, and went 
right on in its course, with scarcely a jar or a jostle 
in its ecclesiastical operations. The New School 
party, stunned by the sudden and summary blow 
of excision, without a legal status and beyond the 
pale of its wonted ecclesiastical relations, was at 
first without a fixed policy; and through abounding 
magnanimity refusing to disentangle itself from in- 
congruous alliances, was by these alliances seriously 
distracted and weakened. Its generosity, magna- 
nimity and charity are beyond all praise, but unhap- 
pily these amiable and noble qualities outran the 
less dazzling and sterner attributes of wisdom, pru- 
dence and a just conservatism. The experiment of 
an amalgamated Presbyterianism, therefore, was 
made in propitious circumstances, under favorable 
conditions and by those whose sentiments and 
sympathies rendered the effort a sincere and cordial 
one; yet the experiment failed, and the failure has 
gone into history. There is nothing in this which 
is derogatory to the party which made the experi- 
ment, but it is, on the contrary, in the highest de- 
gree honorable to it that in the circumstances the 



TO THE REUNION 195 

experiment was made; yet the failure is none the 
less significant and instructive. 

The changes which were made in the constitu- 
tion by the New School Church were soon discov- 
ered to be disastrous to the interests at stake and to 
the efficiency of ecclesiastical operations, and the 
mistake which had thus been made was speedily 
rectified by restoring the "Book" to its original 
form and by reinstating it as the constitutional law 
of the Church both in the letter and in the spirit 
of it. In the violent agitations and amidst the swift 
and turbulent currents which succeeded the division 
the Church had been swept somewhat from its 
moorings, but as soon as the storm had subsided it 
swung back to the safe harbor and the strong an- 
chorage of constitutional Presbyterianism. 

The theory of cooperation and of undenomina- 
tionalism, in spite of the most unselfish and liberal 
efforts in its behalf, gradually broke down, and the 
pitiless logic of facts forced the Church to adopt a 
policy against which her charity and her sympathies 
reluctated, but which the solemn calls of duty and 
the urgent exigences of the times not only justified, 
but rendered imperative. She undertook to educate 
her own ministry, to create and disseminate her 
own literature and to conduct her missions in her 
own fields in her own way; and when to a well- 
defined task she set her hand, the work glowed be- 



196 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

neath her touch. A new energy thrilled along 
every fiber of her organic life. Full of hope and 
zeal and enthusiasm, with a united and inflexible 
purpose, she entered upon a new era in her history 
which was as radiant with promise as the roseate 
sky mantling with the blushes of the morning. She 
had come at length to a clear conception of her mis- 
sion. She saw her work distinctly and emphatic- 
ally outlined in a field which suggested and invited 
boundless effort; and to that work she went with 
heart and mind and soul exulting in the free play of 
her untrammeled individuality. 

The Old School, at the time of the division, had a 
wonderfully homogeneous constituency, a clearly- 
defined theology, a pure Presbyterian form of gov- 
ernment, a fixed policy, an enthusiastic unanimity 
of sentiment, leaders of consummate ability, the 
prestige which accrued from its legally-recognized 
status, an ecclesiastical machinery ready to its hand, 
a definite work to do and an entire singleness of 
purpose in the prosecution of that work. The 
Board of Missions (domestic) and the Board of 
Education had already been organized and in opera- 
tion for a score of years. In the stormy year of 
1837, amidst the tumults of excision and division, 
the Board of Foreign Missions was organized, and 
into this board was at once merged the Western 
Foreign Missionary Society, which had been formed 



TO THE REUNION 197 

and operated by the Synod of Pittsburg for six years 
previous to this date; and thus " the wall was built 
even in troublous times." Nor did this old church, 
even amidst the absorbing interest and excitement 
of such a crisis as that of 1837, forget for so much 
as an hour that "the field is the world." The 
Board of Foreign Missions, which was then consti- 
tuted, has continued to this day to be a source of 
steadily-increasing power and blessing, and on its 
records are the names of as heroic men and women 
as ever planted the cross among savage men or 
amidst "the pestilence that walketh in darkness," 
and its martyrology is as glorious as that which 
was enacted in the Coliseum or in the imperial 
gardens of Nero. 

With a full recognition of the power of the press 
and of the supreme importance of a sound theolog- 
ical literature, the Board of Publication was organ- 
ized in the year 1858. Out of the work of Do- 
mestic Missions grew the Church Erection Fund of 
the New School Church and the Board of Church 
Extension of the Old School Church, both of which 
were merged at the reunion into the Board of 
Church Erection. Nor has the Church forgotten 
her worn-out veterans and their widows and or- 
phans, and her efforts in their behalf resulted in 
the Board of Ministerial Relief. The benevolent 
agencies of the Church are not cunningly-devised 



198 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

frameworks of abstract and finely-spun theories, 
but each one of them has arisen out of the actual 
necessities of the work and the urgent, emphatic 
demands of the times. They are a growth, a de- 
velopment, not an invention. 

In both branches of the Church during the separa- 
tion the subject of slavery produced earnest discus- 
sion and deep, widespread agitations. In the New 
School Church the deliverances on the subject by 
the General Assembly became more pronounced 
from year to year. The Northern portion of that 
Church became gradually but surely more emphatic 
in its anti-slavery convictions and utterances, while 
at the same time the Southern portion, through a 
variety of potent and subtle influences, was quietly 
slipping away from the testimonies of the Church 
against slavery and assuming the position that slave- 
holding was sanctioned by the Bible and was an 
institution not only to be tolerated but defended. 
Of necessity the breach between the parties became 
wider and wider each succeeding year. Their 
views were so divergent and so utterly irreconcil- 
able that there was no hope or possibility of a com- 
promise. The crisis came in the year 1857. The 
Southern Synod withdrew. The debates pre- 
ceding the schism were candid and fraternal, and 
the parties separated without bitterness and with 
sincere mutual respect and love. 



TO THE REUNION 199 

In the meantime, the political horizon grew black 
with angry and portentous clouds, and muttering 
thunders gathered to a storm in which not only 
churches went asunder, but in which States which 
were knit together by ties of brotherhood "were 
rent with civil feuds and drenched with fraternal 
blood." Amidst the trooping furies of an awful civil 
war the Old School Church was riven asunder, the 
split following the line which separated the loyal 
States from those which were in rebellion against 
the Federal government. 

At this point a word is necessary in regard to the 
attitude and the teaching of the Church on the sub- 
ject of slavery. The testimony of the Church on 
this matter has always been clear and explicit. In 
the year 1787 the Synod of New York and Phila- 
delphia "highly approved of the general principles 
in favor of universal liberty that prevail in America, 
and the interest which many of the States had taken 
in promoting the abolition of slavery," and "recom- 
mended to all their people to use the most prudent 
measures, consistent with the interest and the state 
of civil society in the counties where they lived, to 
procure eventually the final abolition of slavery in 
America." This action was reaffirmed in 1793. In 
the year 181 5 the General Assembly " declared their 
cordial approbation of those principles of civil liberty 
which appear to be recognized by the federal and 



200 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

State governments in these United States/' and 
urged the presbyteries under their care "to adopt 
such measures as will secure at least to the rising 
generation of slaves within the bounds of the Church 
a religious education, that they may be prepared for 
the exercise and enjoyment of liberty when God in 
his providence may open a door for their emancipa- 
tion," and the same Assembly denounced "the buy- 
ing and selling of slaves by way of traffic, and all 
undue severity in the management of them, as in- 
consistent with the spirit of the gospel." 

The immortal paper upon the subject which was 
adopted by the General Assembly in the year 1818 
begins with these ringing words: "We consider 
the voluntary enslaving of one portion of the human 
race by another as a gross violation of the most 
precious and sacred rights of human nature, as ut- 
terly inconsistent with the law of God which re- 
quires us to love our neighbor as ourselves, and as 
totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles 
of the gospel of Christ, which enjoins that ' all things 
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, 
do ye even so to them; ' " and the entire paper is in 
the tone and spirit of its initial sentence. The 
action of 1845 deals with the single and specific 
question as to whether slave-holding per se and 
" without regard to circumstances is a sin and a bar 
to Christian communion;" and that action did not 



TO THE REUNION 201 

in any way or to any extent nullify or invalidate the 
former deliverances of the Church courts on the sub- 
ject. The General Assembly of 1846 declared that 
in its judgment the action of the General Assembly 
of 1845 was not intended to deny or to rescind the 
testimony often uttered by the General Assembly 
previous to that date. Upon the deliverance of 1818 
the Church as a body has always stood. To have 
abandoned that ground would at any time have rent 
the Church in twain. 

Up to the time of the division the united Church 
occupied that ground. After the division in 1837, 
the utterances of the New School Church on the 
subject grew clearer and sharper every year. During 
the same time the Old School Church, while she was 
not aggressive on the subject, but for the sake of 
peace and charity was conservative, yet stood firmly 
by her past testimonies, so that even during the 
civil war and after the abolition of slavery she had 
not to change a sentence or a letter in her record, 
nor to adjust in the slightest her attitude so as to 
put herself in line and sympathy with the moral 
forces of the times. While the General Assembly 
thus held the ground of 1818, it must nevertheless 
be confessed that a rapid change of sentiment was 
going on in the Southern portion of the Church, 
until finally the bold position was assumed that 
slavery as an institution was right politically and 



202 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

morally, and as such was to be defended and con- 
served, but the Church as a Church never held nor 
sanctioned such views. The spirit of both the Old 
and the New School Churches was to bear unequiv- 
ocal testimony against the system of slavery as an 
institution, and yet at the same time to exercise the 
largest charity toward those who, through no fault 
of their own, were involved in the evils of that sys- 
tem. If, therefore, the Church committed an error, 
the error was on the side of charity; and if there 
were those who proved recreant to her testimonies 
and who abused the " charity that hopeth all 
things," the fault was theirs, not hers. Whatever 
may have been the errors of individual members or 
of portions of her communion, I am bold and proud 
to say that there is nothing in her records on the 
subject of slavery of which she need be ashamed or 
for which she need offer an apology. 

Amidst the fearful throes of rebellion both 
Churches were in full sympathy with the govern- 
ment in its efforts to restore order and to preserve the 
integrity of the nation, making their voices heard 
and their influence felt in favor of supporting the 
"powers that be as ordained of God," and both 
Churches rejoiced and sang hallelujahs when, in the 
providence of God, slavery, the cause of the re- 
bellion, was utterly overthrown and ground to pow- 
der. Neither, in their ardent loyalty to their coun- 



TO THE REUNION 203 

try, did they forget their allegiance to their Lord, 
nor were they even in these perilous times derelict 
in carrying forward the standard of the cross. 

In the suspense and danger and agony which 
attended the ravages of war, Christians of all 
denominations were drawn closer to each other. 
Great union associations, such as the Christian 
Commission, threw different Churches into con- 
tact and sympathy. This was specially the case 
with the Old and New School Presbyterian 
Churches. In the furnace of affliction their hearts 
were fused and mingled. They began to look each 
other in the face, to take each other by the hand, 
and in doing so they found that their hands were 
warmed by the same Presbyterian blood, and that 
their pulses beat to the same Christian hopes and 
purposes. They found that they had imperceptibly 
come together, that they were standing on common 
ground, that God had been leading them by a way 
which they knew not. 

Each Church in its own sphere and in its own 
way had been working out important problems 
under the guidance of divine Providence. In its 
own sphere and according to the laws of its inner 
life the New School Church had freed itself from 
alien elements and entangling alliances, and had 
become a homogeneous Presbyterian body both in 



204 FROM ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

doctrine and government. The Old School Church, 
straining her conservatism to the utmost tension, 
hoped and prayed that the dark and perplexing 
problem of slavery might be solved in peace and 
charity and without the stern arbitrament of the 
sword. But God willed otherwise. The fetters of 
the slave must be dissolved in blood. Standing 
bravely by her testimonies against slavery and bear- 
ing her witness against treason and rebellion, the 
Old School Church calmly awaited the decisive 
events of Providence; and when the schism of the 
Southern Church came, taking from out her pale 
the slavery issue, she felt herself relieved of a 
weight which had grievously beset her for years. 

Thus God in his wise and mysterious providence 
had settled the issues between the two Churches. 
All that was left was for them to acknowledge and 
accept what God had done. The union of the two 
bodies was consummated on November 12, 1869, 
in the city of Pittsburg, Pa., and the two churches 
became organically one on the basis of the standards, 
pure and simple, and under the title of the Presby- 
terian Church in the United States of America, 
forming, as we trust, a true Church of Christ, 
whose uplifted banners shall become a rallying- 
point for all Presbyterians on the continent, where 
they may meet and settle all differences in a way 
which will be honorable to all parties, where the 



TO THE REUNION 205 

scattered Presbyterian tribes may flow together as 
the tribes of old Israel poured to Zion, and shall be- 
come one, and shall be to all the world the best 
representative of a true unity which is not formed 
by external appliances, as though bound by hoops 
of steel, but a unity which is developed and 
strengthened by a conscious and intelligent oneness 
of intellectual belief and spiritual life — one not as a 
wired skeleton is one, but as a living man is one; a 
broad Church not in the sense of being latitudinarian, 
but broad in Christian sympathy and in the world- 
wide scope of Christian effort. 

Since the reunion the progress of the Church has 
been steady, harmonious and rapid. With past 
alienations, feuds and bitternesses buried utterly out 
of sight and out of hearing, united, hopeful and 
" strong in the Lord," bound by indissoluble ties of 
brotherhood and fellowship to those of our own 
household of faith, and with ardent and ample 
charity for all others, we stand on the threshold of 
the new century, and with devout thanksgiving to 
God for the past and for the present we hail and 
welcome the great future. 

Such is the past. Its perils, its toils, its journey- 
ings, its disasters, its achievements, its conflicts, its 
discouragements, its declensions, its revivals, its 
mighty sermons, its high debates, its struggles, its 



206 FR031 ADOPTION FORM OF GOVERNMENT 

privations, its sacrifices, its rewards, its failures, its 
successes, its hopes, its disappointments, its divi- 
sions, its reunions, its unheralded and unrequited 
labors, — have all gone into their place, and have 
performed their part in fulfilling the purpose of God 
toward this land and the world. They form a 
picture of surpassing interest — a picture strong in 
blended light and shadow, but having withal much 
more of light than of shadow. We have good rea- 
son to be proud of our Presbyterian ancestry, for what 
they were, for what they achieved and for what they 
represented. We have a glorious heraldry, but we 
must not rest in these. 

The great Roman satirist lashes with whips of 
scorpions the degenerate sons of the Curii and the 
Lepidi, who with dice and wine and soft voluptuous- 
ness melted away their dissolute lives in the statued 
halls of illustrious ancestors, where every tablet 
groaned with a wealth of genealogical lore and 
every wreath and chaplet was redolent with glorious 
memories. Let us be careful that we incur not 
such satire. We have been sitting beneath our 
genealogical tree and rejoicing in its staunch 
branches and in its capacious shade. We have 
been gathering up the articulate lessons and the 
solemn, inspiring voices of the century that is gone. 
Let these lessons and voices only quicken us to read 
aright the signs of the times, and to hear and to 



TO THE HE UNION 207 

interpret rightly the voice of God as it comes to us 
in his word and his providence, that through 
watching and prayer, through faithfulness and self- 
sacrifice, the present may not be a lie and a slander 
on the past, but that it may be a consistent 
opening and preparation for a brighter and grander 
future. 



A SHORT HISTORY 
OF AMERICAN 
PRESBYTERIANISM 



1/ 



